[7] My Life as a 10-Year-Old Boy opens with a dedication to Daws Butler, a list of acknowledgements and a foreword from Cartwright's The Simpsons co-star Dan Castellaneta.
In the following chapters, she recalls the early days of The Simpsons, commenting on the recording process and her co-stars and revealing how she got the roles of some of the other characters she voices, including Nelson Muntz and Ralph Wiggum.
Guest stars she talks about include Ernest Borgnine, Danny DeVito, Kirk Douglas, Mel Gibson, Kelsey Grammer, Tom Jones, Michael Jackson, Mickey Rooney, Meryl Streep and Elizabeth Taylor.
[7] Cartwright began a publicity tour in late October 2000, starting in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio,[9] where the book became the top selling non-fiction in the town in the first week of November 2000.
Susan Shapiro of The New York Times wrote that "Although the paradoxes of being 'a celebrity nobody knows' are interesting, the photographs, diary entries and overly cute commentaries make this book feel like a personal scrapbook.
It's kind of fun to discover how the show is put together and how an adult woman snagged one of the coolest jobs in the world [...] If only it wasn't all so relentlessly perky.
"[15] Bacchus concurred, saying "Cartwright writes as if she were speaking to devotees of The Simpsons Fan Club, too often providing bland tidbits of background that only obsessives would ever really care about.
"[14] Rob Sheridan of the National Post also believes that the book is "aimed squarely at rabid Simpsons fans", and criticized the writing, commenting that "the chronology of her story is sometimes muddled, and a lot of sentences have that first-draft feeling [...] But none of this is anything to have a cow about.
Julian Hall of The Independent criticized it for a lack of inside stories about The Simpsons, writing that "Cartwright never allows you to become bored but that means some issues are skirted over faster than American closing credits on television.
"[23] Brian Logan of The Guardian described Cartwright as "a lively host [...] eager to please", but found the play to be "an overweeningly upbeat collection of Simpsons chitchat.
"[25] Clive Davis of The Times wrote that "In contrast to The Simpsons itself, where not a line, not a syllable, goes to waste, Cartwright has a habit of losing herself in anecdotes that stumble into dead-ends.