The Ultimate Millennial Multihyphenate The Ultimate Millennial Multihyphenate

Paige DeSorbo chose her own path, conquering reality television, becoming an influencer and starting a hit podcast. Now she’s written a book.

When Paige DeSorbo graduated from college in 2015, she scored a full-time position at a TV station in her hometown, Albany, N.Y. She’d always wanted to be an on-air personality, so the job seemed perfect, at least on paper. As her mom put it at the time, Ms. DeSorbo could work her way up to anchor, get married, have kids, and live down the street.

But she imagined something different for herself.

“I remember just getting the biggest pit in my stomach of like — no, that’s not my life. No way,” Ms. DeSorbo, now 32, said in a recent interview.

Instead, she persuaded her parents to foot six months of rent in New York City so that she could try to find something better. She took a job as an executive assistant at ABC before landing a role on “Summer House,” a Bravo reality show that follows young New Yorkers as they spend debaucherous summer weekends at a shared house in the Hamptons.

“​​I called my dad crying when they offered it to me because I was like, ‘I think I’m actually too sensitive to do this,’” Ms. DeSorbo said. “And I remember him saying: ‘Do it for the first summer, and if you hate it, we’ll get you out of it. You never have to go back. And if you love it, you’ll never wonder, Oh, imagine if I didn’t do this.’ And honestly, after the second weekend, I was like, ‘I love it.’”

So began Ms. DeSorbo’s unexpected career as a reality star.