'Honey Boo Boo' Is 'No Longer a Caricature of Her Own Making'

Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson still maintains the bubbly personality that charmed reality-TV audiences. But she's now "a calm and reflective young adult" who's "no longer a caricature of her own making," according to People, which features the 19-year-old college student on its cover. The former pageant princess, now studying nursing at Colorado's Regis University, says it's "crazy" all the things she's been through since finding fame on TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras at age 5. For starters, her mother, June Shannon, better known as "Mama June," became addicted to crack cocaine when Thompson was a young teen and was charged with felony drug possession in 2019.

"People were like, 'I saw your mama on the news with a busted tooth, strung out,'" Thompson recalls. "I'm like, 'Great, like I didn't see that, too.'" In 2022, Thompson's older adult sister, Lauryn "Pumpkin" Shannon, became her legal guardian. A year later, another sister, Anna "Chickadee" Cardwell, died of a rare cancer. There've also been financial struggles, says Thompson, who claims she's never seen any money from her time on the Toddlers & Tiaras spinoff Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Noting her mom took some of her earnings from Dancing With the Stars, Thompson says she had little money of her own when she graduated high school. Still, she dreamed big.

"I just always told myself you know that you want to do something better with your life and bigger with your life than just being on TV," she says. Now entering her junior year in college and living with longtime boyfriend Dralin Carswell, she plans to become "the only one in my family with a degree," she says. "I love that I've persevered past who people thought I was." Thompson opens up further in Lifetime's I Was Honey Boo Boo, a biopic premiering Saturday. "I did not want this movie to be throwing punches at my mama and making her out to be the bad guy," Thompson tells People. "But I didn't hold back, and if she gets mad, at the end of the day it's the truth." (More Honey Boo Boo stories.)