Jessica Simpson details hitting “rock bottom” amid her private battle with addiction.
In an excerpt from her new memoir Open Book, out Feb. 4, the 39-year-old singer, actress and fashion mogul said her problem with alcohol and pills came to a head on Halloween 2017. She and her husband, Eric Johnson, were taking their daughter Maxwell to her school for an early morning event — and Simpson had already been drinking.
“It was 7:30 in the morning and I’d already had a drink,” Simpson revealed, showing the shocking extent of her problem.
The couple hosts an annual family-friendly Halloween party for friends, but as Simpson’s team got her ready — in her Willie Nelson outfit — later that the same day, the start was “zoned out.” When it came to getting Maxwell and their son Ace into their costumes — as a cowboy and a princess — Simpson said she was too intoxicated to help.
“I was terrified of letting them see me in that shape,” Simpson wrote about her kids. “I am ashamed to say that I don’t know who got them into their costumes that night.”
The incident left her too guilt-ridden to face her kids the next morning. Before she went to bed, she took an Ambien to sleep and “slept in” because she was “afraid to see them, afraid I had failed them.”
Simpson said she “hid until they left” for school “then drank” some more.
Simpson’s closest friends — who were worried about her based on whatever happened at the Halloween party — came to her house in what sounds like an intervention.
“I need to stop,” she said she admitted to them. “Something’s got to stop. And if it’s alcohol that’s doing this and making things worse, then I quit.”
The excerpt detailed how her friends gathered around her and helped her set up a treatment plan with a team of doctors, assistance from her mom and dad and therapy sessions to face her childhood trauma being sexually abused which was the root of a lot of her pain.
However, the excerpt doesn’t note the role Johnson, whom Simpson got together with in 2010, played in getting her into treatment. While it could be an omission, tabloid reports from around that time claimed Johnson was fed up with Simpson’s drinking and considered ending their marriage over it. A source told Star magazine at the time, the former football player was “tired of playing dad” to both her and their two kids. In previous excerpt from the book, Simpson calls Johnson a “selfless and loving person.”
Simpson told People magazine that while writing about the Halloween incident in her book, “I realized I was pretty rock bottom.”
However, sobriety has helped make life especially beautiful for the now mom-of-three.
“I had room for so many wonderful moments that I would have missed: sober for the first time ever in my studio and seeing Maxwell grab a guitar. Ace in pajamas he put on himself, proudly adding a sticker to his bedtime chart.”
She continued, “There’s just no better gift. There’s no better gift I can give my kids, there’s no better gift I can give my husband. More importantly, there’s no better gift I can give myself.”
Simpson also recorded the audiobook, which will include new songs inspired by her memoir.
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