The kids are asleep, and my husband is reading in the other room. So it’s just you and me.
Every night after we put our children to bed, I come down here to the study to write. It’s cold here in Los Angeles, so bedtimes have been creeping later. My daughter Maxwell is six and my son Ace is five, and they have the kind of energy that needs to be burned off outdoors or it will just add up like a bill that needs to be paid at the end of the night.
We divide and conquer at bedtime. Eric takes Ace, who wants every minute he can get playing with Dad. I take Maxwell, who still lets me sing “Jesus Loves Me” with her every night.
Tonight, in Maxwell’s room, when prayers were done, I got up from sitting on the bed—which takes some strategic planning when you’re seven months pregnant—and I was about to slip out. “Will you rub my nose?” she asked.
This is something I did with both my kids when I breastfed them. I sat with them in my rocker, and stroked the bridges of their nose lightly, back and forth. The times they ask for this are growing further apart, and I know that one of these times will be the last one.
As I rubbed her nose, Maxwell settled in to her pillow and sighed. I looked down at her closed eyes. She is growing up so fast, I thought. Just on the edge of the age I was when I began beating myself up when I fell short of perfect. A few months back, we were in the kitchen at lunchtime. I gave her tomato soup and I asked her if she wanted some bread.
“Bella told me bread makes you fat.”
You are six, I thought.
“Maxwell, bread does not make you fat,” I said. “And I don’t understand why you would think about that.”
“Well, Bella’s mom does not eat bread.”
“Well, you’re gonna eat bread.”
“Oh good,” she said, and paused. “Because I really love bread.”
“You listen to what your mommy says,” I said. “Don’t listen to someone else’s mommy.”
I even put extra butter on that bread. As I did, I thought, How does she even know what “fat” is? It was a wake-up call. She already has this world to grow up in, and I want her to feel safe enough to love herself and the body that God gave her. Not waste the time I did being cruel to myself. Standing in front of the mirror at 17, pinching a tiny vice grip of stomach fat until I bruised, because the first thing I heard from the record company after I signed was “You’ve got to lose 15 pounds.”
Maxi is one of the reasons I am writing this book. It’s also a commitment I’ve made to you, though it’s hard sometimes to look back on some moments in my life that I spent years, okay, decades, trying to forget. For me, sitting down here with a piece of paper and a pen is like, “Hello, self! What are we gonna confront tonight?”
This was supposed to be a very different book. Five years ago, I was approached to write a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life. The Jessica Simpson Collection had become the top-selling celebrity fashion line, the first to earn $1 billion in annual sales. I delivered the keynote at the Forbes Power Women Summit and Women’s Wear Daily was talking up how smart I was to make clothes that flatter all silhouettes. (Hello, I’ve had every size in my closet, so I’d better be inclusive.) You too could have a perfect life. Like me.
The deal was set, and it was a lot of money. And I walked away. The truth is that I didn’t want to lie to you. I couldn’t be honest with you if I wasn’t honest with myself first.
To get to this point, to talking to you right here in this moment, I had to really feel. And I hadn’t been doing that. Up until a few years ago, I had been a feelings addict. Love, loss—whichever, whatever, as long as it was epic. I just needed enough noise to distract me from the pain I had been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age 12, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, “Just give him all your light. See if it saves him. . . .”
To avoid feeling, I numbed myself with alcohol. For about three years of my life, up until Halloween 2017, I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. I never hid it. I had given up drinking so easily when I was pregnant and never craved it, so I didn’t think it was a problem. But our house was the gathering place for all my friends. I had a prescription for a stimulant, which gave me the focus to never get messy. I’d look around at my friends getting sleepy and/or sloppy and think, I’m just an ox, I guess. Then at night, still flying from the second stimulant that I had maybe taken at 6 p.m. with tons of alcohol in my system, I’d take an Ambien.
Yes, I realize I am very lucky to be here with you. I told myself, Eventually, you’ll get it together. When the kids notice, I promised myself, I’d stop.
There was no time, though. I was juggling relationships, my business, motherhood, and the needs of anybody but me. Maybe you’ll relate: It’s like when everything is moving really fast, but you’ve created that speed. You stand there thinking, Okay, when am I gonna jump back in?
And when I did, I knew I had to face my fears and do it sober.
I had to strip away the self-medicating to feel the pain and figure out what was wrong. I’m still doing the work in therapy two times a week resolving those issues. Honestly, I am not sure if I’ll have another drink in the future. Will I have a glass of wine in the South of France in two years? But then I remind myself that life is really just about one moment at a time. To not think about two years from now, but to think about me right now.
Right now, with this book, I want the freedom to say, “Well, there are no more secrets.” I have grown into myself and come to a place where I want to be honest about my flaws. If I can do that in front of the world, then I can remain honest with myself.
I have kept journals since I was fifteen and I dragged out a huge box to read through as I started writing to you. It upsets me to read some things I said about myself. In the journals from 1999, I beat myself up about how fat I was before I even gave the world a chance to. Ten years later, I wrote about the world telling me exactly what they thought of me when I wore size 27 “mom jeans” to a Chili CookOff concert in Florida. The sad thing is that I talked about finally feeling confident in the pages before that.
But there are good times to relive too. There are moments when I read what I wrote now and I say, “Wait, I like this person. We could make a good life together if we were friends.”
I also hope to be your friend. I am going to need you to hold my hand through some memories, and there may be times that I’ll end up holding yours as we confront similar things that scare us. I promise to be totally honest with you, so you can feel safe to be honest with yourself too.
Ace was in the backseat, recounting an episode of Wild Kratts. At four, my son lived for his cartoons, and could reel off facts about the animals he saw on the nature show.
Eric was at the wheel, driving us to a Tuesday morning Halloween assembly at our daughter Maxwell’s school. I sat on the passenger side, absently practicing my “I have it together” face.
It was 7:30 in the morning and I’d already had a drink. I always had a glittercup in reach at home. That’s what I called the shiny tumblers filled with vodka and flavored Perrier.
At that time, the flavor was mostly strawberry, but by then I didn’t care what it tasted like. I just needed a drink every morning because I had the shakes.
I knew I was falling apart, but I had to look like a good mom who was present for her children. Which I was—I am—but I was just never going to be the cupcake mom or the arts-and-crafts helper at school. Even then, when I knew I was operating at about 15 percent, I knew I was a good mom.
We pulled into the lot and I spotted my dad’s new Mercedes. I had not seen much of my father since my parents split in 2012. They were married for 34 years, and I had a hard time being around them together since they’d stopped loving each other. My father decided to tell me his plan to leave my mother when I was at Cedars-Sinai hospital, a week before I delivered Maxwell. No spotlight is safe around a Simpson—we’ll steal it every time.
He was the pitchman who could sell anything. If my dad can make people believe in God, I always thought at the start of my career, he can surely make people believe in me.
He did for a long time, but I had to fire him as my manager in 2012. He thought I was following my mother’s wishes, but he had made some bad deals for me. Just stupid stuff that people promised to him and he believed. Bridges were burned, and I didn’t know how many until I tried to cross them. It took about five times to really fire him before the message stuck. The first time I chickened out and did it in an email. I finally just said it to his face.
Now, in the gym before the concert, I realized my dad was talking to me. His face changed, and I realized he smelled the vodka on my breath. His eyes widened in surprise, and then narrowed in a look of concern or pity, I wasn’t sure.
Finally, the kids started the performance and everyone cheered. Maxwell spotted us in the crowd, and I let out a “whoop” when we made eye contact. I was so proud of her.
It’s enough that this piece of my heart walked around outside of me, but to see her be so confident was a blessing. I was pulled into being present, forgetting everyone else around me. Just there. I wished it could be like that all the time.
When I performed, I was always present, but it had been years since I was onstage. My kids had never even seen me perform. For about a year, I’d been writing and recording music in my home studio—raw and from the heart. It was music I was really proud of. But I still worried that to my family I was like a pop star in theory only.
“Dad, come to the house,” I said. “I’ll ride with you.”
He has this way of cocking his head when he is excited, a constant movement that shows all the energy inside him. “Of course,” he said.
“I wanna play you some of my music.”
For the past year, I’d both dreaded and dreamt of letting my dad hear this music. As my manager, my father heard every demo I ever made. He knew all my music before it was even produced. But I hadn’t told him I had been writing. And I had not just been making music about what I’d been through in life, there were songs about him.
We got to the house at about 9:30, and Dad had to navigate around the party rental trucks already lining up. My friend Stephanie, who I’ve known since fifth grade, is an amazing event planner and I asked her to put together a Halloween party that would also celebrate our friend Koko’s birthday. Eric and I had become famous for our extravagant parties, especially on Halloween. Every year I posted a photo on my socials of the family in costume, and in 2011 I even announced my second pregnancy in a Halloween post of me holding my bump in a tight mummy costume. I put pressure on myself to make each year bigger and better than the last.
As soon as my dad and I got into the house, I got a new glittercup going. There was comfort in the weight of a full tumbler, the slosh of the ice as I took sips. Liquid courage to go downstairs to the recording studio.
I cued up “Practice What You Preach,” which I saw as a direct hit at him. As he listened, the blood drained from his face until it was ashen. What have I done? I thought. He nodded, and started crying,
“I am so proud of you,” he said. For the first time in my entire life, he was responding to something I created not as a manager, but as a father. “You’re not mad?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m sad I’m not the one promoting it.” I waited for him to start with a business plan, some pitch to lure me back in. Instead, he just said, “I love you.”
The edges of my memory begin to blur here. I know I led him upstairs, and he talked about coming back for the party later. “I’ll see you tonight.”
I held it together until he was outside, then I leaned on the closed door. Slowly, I fell to a sitting position, put down my glittercup, and slumped down to lie on the stone floor of my entryway. On my back, I looked up at the vaulted ceiling, focusing on the chandelier as tears fell. I lost him, I thought. Even though he loved and accepted it, I experienced the pain of him not being my manager for the first time. How was I ever going to be successful without him? And why in the world would I ever be so judgmental of my father when I wasn’t true to what I said in my life? Forget what he preached. I was a fraud. I took all the pressures in my head and blamed them on my relationships with other people. Instead of it being my relationship with myself.
I felt nekkid. Not naked, nekkid. Truly bare, with no one else to blame anymore but me.
I wasn’t drunk. Trust me, two was not doing it at that point. All the feelings I had been suppressing washed over me in a rush, and I was drowning in them. My world was rotating around me so fast that I didn’t have any clue as to how to control it. I tried to talk to God, because we had always worked things out together.
“Are you okay?”
It wasn’t God, it was our house manager Randy. I didn’t answer at first. It was a real question. In my entire life, whenever someone asked me if I was okay, the answer was a reflex: “Yes.” Because, no matter what, I always wanted it to be true.
“I am not okay,” I said, surprising myself. He went to get other people. I don’t know who. There was a flurry of texts. My friends freaked out and called Eric. I was ashamed, and more so because it was Halloween. I had to be a mom that night. I had to take my kids trick-or-treating. I had to be here for the 80 people who were coming over. And now I was stuck on the floor.
Ace would see me like this, I thought. At any moment he would walk in with Eric. That’s what got me up. I needed to hide.
I got another glittercup. By then my close friends started arriving to check on me. I greeted everyone the same way: “I’m not okay.” Not as an apology, but a baffled realization. I couldn’t fix it.
Then the hair and makeup team arrived. A glam squad for a breakdown. The plan for my Halloween costume was to dress me up as Willie Nelson, my friend and spirit animal ever since we worked together in late 2004 on my first film, The Dukes of Hazzard.
Eric came in and I made like I was in character. It saved me from being honest. He asked if I wanted to help the kids get ready. I didn’t answer. I let it seem like I was too busy, when he knew that kind of stuff was always a joy for me. Maxwell was home, he said. I was terrified of letting her see me in that shape. I am ashamed to say that I don’t know who got them into their costumes that night.
But I needed the picture to post. So I went through the motions and got the photos, like every mom does on special occasions. Just get the damn photo so we can create the memory. Then I could go back inside and hide. As I turned to go inside, Eric announced we were all going trick-or-treating. I forgot this had been the plan.
“Eric, I can’t,” I whispered.
“What do you mean, you can’t?” he said. He had been shouldering much of the party hosting on his own that day. There was frustration in his voice. “We’ve got, like, 20 golf carts.”
I turned and went upstairs to my room. I didn’t care if I had a house full of guests. I always put so much pressure on myself to have these parties. Now it all felt so pointless.
I took an Ambien. Maybe two. It was a security pill to me—no matter how tired I was, I was terrified of being awake in bed. I knew exactly why I was always so afraid, but that didn’t mean I was ever going to do anything about it.
My housekeeper, Evelyn, found me crying in my room. She had been with me 15 years and was like a second mom to me. She sat next to me and held me.
Here I would like to tell you that I got up early the next day and got my kids to school. I did not. I slept in, afraid to see them and hoping that Eric would tell them I wasn’t feeling well. I hid until they left, then drank. I felt emotionally hungover, and thought I needed it to recover. I needed to be normal for when my friends came over for our weekly meeting. There’s a core three who help me take care of business: My publicist and friend Lauren; CaCee, my friend since I first signed with Columbia in 1997; and Koko, who is not just my assistant but one of my best friends.
That day was supposed to be special, because I’d flown my hair colorist Rita Hazan in from New York. CaCee and Koko arrived first, finding me still in a panicked state as Rita readied her station in my home. Koko was obviously hurt, and I immediately started crying to her. I blubbered with apologies as Rita left the room to get something.
“I . . . missed . . . putting . . . the . . . candles . . . in . . .the . . . Ziploc . . . bag . . .”
“It’s okay,” Koko said meekly.
“But I feel awful.”
Stephanie walked in. She was there to load out the party she had put so much work into and that I had missed. She took in the tension right away.
CaCee gave me a sharp, direct, “Why do think you feel awful?”
“Because I wasn’t present?” I said, like I was guessing at a math problem.
“And why weren’t you present?” she said.
I knew that one. “Because I probably drank too much?”
“Probably?” CaCee asked. “Jess, why do you think you drank too much? Do you think you’ve been drinking too much a lot of days?”
“Yes,” I blurted. “I need to stop. Something’s gotta stop. And if it’s the alcohol that’s doing this and making things worse, then I quit.”
“Jessica,” she said, as Rita looked on. “This is your rock bottom. This is it. Do you want to change?”
“Yes!” I said. “Like, right now. Yes.”
I breathed in, breathed out, and looked around. “At least I can say my rock bottom had pretty pillows,” I said. “A soft landing.”
The girls gathered me up in a group hug, and from the center I called out to Eric.
He came in. “Babe, I’m gonna stop drinking,” I said, just like that. As if I said, “I’m going to the store. Need anything?”
He looked right at me. “Then I will too,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. We’re in this together.”
“Okay, can you make me one last drink?” I asked. “Just the last one to say good-bye.”
I know, I know. I hear the record scratch too. But I said I’d be honest with you. I had one more glittercup.
And then, as Rita wrapped foils around my hair, Stephanie, CaCee, and Koko explained that they had been planning for this moment for more than six months. Lauren already had a doctor lined up, one who specialized in getting celebrities in-home treatment for addiction.
It didn’t break my heart that I was such a mess that they wanted to intervene. It broke my heart that they felt they had to go behind my back. But they were right. I had deeper problems than alcohol, and I couldn’t resolve the problem until I threw away the crutch.
“Guys, I think we should pray,” said Stephanie. I stood, foils still in my hair, and the four of us held hands.
I was crying, tears pouring from my eyes, and Lauren told me she lined up the call with the doctor. “She’s ready now. Are you?”
Once I was on the phone with the doctor, I started in with a complete play-by-play of all my life’s traumas. The sexual abuse I suffered in childhood, and the abusive, obsessive relationships I clung to in adulthood. I was crying, the women doing my extensions were crying, and my friends were a mess. Still, I reeled off everything in a matter-of-fact manner, connecting dots about why each event had contributed to my anxiety, finally ending with “So this is why I need help and why I can’t do this on my own.”
And the work began. To walk forward through my anxiety, I first had to look back to understand what pain I was running from, and what I was trying to hide.