Open Book - by Jessica Simpson

Published:

Open Book - by Jessica Simpson

Read: 2025-01-03

Recommend: 10/10

I was moved on many occasions by her way of narrating her memoir, and I believe she is both genuine and sincere. As she says, ‘Pain is where all the tools are.’

Notes

Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:

  1. My daughter Maxwell is six now 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. The poor kiddos have to be at school at seven a.m., so getting them down by eight or eight-thirty is tough.

  2. 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.

  3. I didn’t think I was enough, so I overcompensated by making my life a series of experiences for everyone else. There was always another friends-and-family getaway overseas, and then I’d come home to plan an over-the-top kid’s birthday party.

  4. I can’t really stand in front of the world and say how much I love myself when I’m destroying myself. I had to strip away all 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? The last thing I need is another reason to feel self-conscious about paparazzi catching me doing something and proclaiming, “Oh, she’s off the wagon.” 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. Two years from now will figure itself out.

  5. I’ve come to recognize fear when I see it. It may show itself in different ways, but it’s a familiar face, isn’t it? I have a different relationship to fear now. I’ve learned that we grow from walking through it, and a lot of people don’t even know they have that option. You either conquer it, or you let it destroy you. So, let’s do this together. I promise we’ll laugh, too, because I do get myself into situations. I mean, it had to be a Chili CookOff of all places. Most of all, I promise to be totally honest with you, so you can feel safe to be honest with yourself, too.

  6. A weight, one I didn’t even know I was carrying, lifted. I’d gotten so used to it. The sense that my father wouldn’t love me if he wasn’t managing me. The certainty that I did something wrong. But instead of relief, I felt untethered. Who was I if I had no one to blame for my life but myself?

  7. 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.

  8. If you are being bullied, whether it’s because you’re gay or someone decides they don’t like something about you, let me be the Lesa who says, “I see you.” You are perfectly made.

  9. Sophomore year was such a weird time for me. I had this thing that I was afraid to call a career because it seemed so make-believe, so I just called it “my music.” I never felt like I was doing enough to make it happen, and it didn’t help that no one at my school thought it was real.

  10. Nick was a natural. He could talk to anybody, answering the same interview question for the fifteenth time that day and act like his answer was something that just occurred to him. I’ve always said that if he wasn’t a singer, he should have been a politician because he was so personable. I was always fumbling, saying something I didn’t realize was funny until everyone laughed.

  11. We had become actors in our own lives, playing ourselves. Worse, we slowly started acting out our parts even when cameras weren’t rolling. When we did appearances, we didn’t want to disappoint people by not doing the whole act. It didn’t feel wrong, because it was just exaggerated, idealized versions of ourselves.

  12. The good student trying to impress the marriage counselor. Nick was against the idea that we needed therapy, alternating between two excuses: the therapist would probably sell us out to a tabloid, and we could get through this ourselves.

  13. I began to realize contact with him was an addiction, and I would make these grand pronouncements that each time was the last time. I was grateful that he had expanded my worldview and made me appreciate so many things about culture, but I needed to walk away. This wasn’t a game.

  14. “Your friends don’t exist,” he spat. “You just pay them to be around you.” It was a knife, cutting me down to the rawest marrow. My mouth dropped open. The one thing I always had was my friendships.

  15. I arrived in Nairobi a little after six in the morning. I was in Kenya for Operation Smile, a decades-old medical charity providing reconstructive surgeries for children worldwide with cleft lips, palates, and other facial deformities that were either life-threatening or socially ostracizing.

  16. When I got back to America, I would make steps to start my new life. I had to escape, and I wouldn’t be leaving Nick to be with anybody. I was escaping to be with myself.

  17. “What is the point in being a power couple if we’re faking it?” I said. “There’s no real power in this anymore. Real power is in authenticity.”

  18. I felt it. I looked out and saw that people were crying with me. I could do this life without Nick, because I would never be alone.

  19. “Please don’t leave me,” he said, and I was back in my body, looking into his eyes. “I love you so much.” “Love is not enough,” I said. “If love was enough, I would stay forever. But it isn’t enough. We have to like each other. We have to be friends.”

  20. A lot of celebrities crash and burn with clothing lines, mainly because they let their pride get in the way. They either try to sell something that isn’t like anything in their Dior-stuffed closet, so it is out of touch with what is truly wearable, or they try to do super high-end sample sizes at four hundred dollars each. I don’t need the price tag on something with my name on it to be high just so I feel fancy. I might buy that stuff—like, a lot of that stuff—and I respect it. But I don’t need to sell it. You have to let go of your ego in this business. I always say, “People can walk all over me as long as it’s my logo on the bottom on the shoe.”

  21. “Did . . . were you breaking up with me to hurt yourself?” I asked. “Just so you could get a song?” I had thought I was crazy. There were times he left, and it was my fault, and I have taken responsibility for those moments. But other times a breakup was so out of the blue that it seemed to come just as we were finally getting somewhere. Now I knew the truth. I was a pet bird. He would throw me into the sky and watch me catch air and soar long enough that it meant something when he pulled a gun from his back pocket to shoot me down, expertly aiming to graze a wing, never a kill shot to end the misery. To think that every single time I lay on the ground, broken and bewildered, he took his time walking over. Observing me to jot down notes and hum a new song of heartbreak. And every time he “found me,” I looked up at him, grateful to be taken in, sorry for the trouble I must have caused him. I wish I had walked out right then. I didn’t. He had me so messed up that inside twenty minutes I was all in on his “wait and see” terms. It felt inevitable to be in love with John, so I continued talking to him for months. I told friends I was “back with” him, and they stocked up on emotional bandages. But I knew now not to let him get close enough to shoot me down again. This bird wasn’t going back in the cage, no matter how bad he needed a song.

  22. Give a girl an insult, she’ll feel bad for a day, but teach her to hate her body, she’ll feel bad forever. After The Price of Beauty, I knew I needed to separate what really mattered to me and what mattered to my ego. In subsequent interviews, I worked hard to say, “I like the way I look,” whether I was up or down ten pounds. All kinds of women started coming up to me, not to give me a supportive word, but to say that I made them feel good. “We look good,” I would hear. They thanked me for setting an example that we don’t need to measure our self-worth with a scale.

  23. I didn’t accept his apology. I deleted all his contact information from my phone. I was done with this man in a way I never thought was possible. When he reached out to me, I changed my number and changed my email. Delete. Look, I hold on to everybody. If I think about it, I can really start to hurt about past relationships. I can go there so easily, because I gave so much of my time and my self to these guys. You feel like you need some return on that investment, but sometimes it’s just personal growth. You probably have that someone, too. I think it’s okay every now and again to reflect on that time. Get down the box from the top shelf of the emotional closet and marvel at the things that used to mean so much. The keepsakes of our mistakes, the souvenirs of lost years. But know when to start making new memories with people who deserve the you that you are now. I can’t tell you how many of my girlfriends have warned me not to write about John. “He’ll come for you,” one told me, genuinely concerned. But I am grateful he removed himself from my life so spectacularly. It cleared the way for destiny to knock on my door.

  24. One of my girlfriends who knew my cycles asked if I wanted to take a second test. I didn’t want to pee on another stick, because I didn’t want it to say anything different. If this was some foolish dream, I wanted to live in it longer.

  25. While I chose to see my mother over my father, I also felt the lightest barrier forming between her and me. It was self-protection. She was hurting, and someone who’s read as many self-help books as I have knows, hurt people hurt people. She would say something cutting to me, and I would later turn it over in my head like a puzzle. It took me a long time to realize that when she did that, it was because she didn’t like herself in that moment. She didn’t want to make me cry, she only wanted to take me to the same dark place where she was. But that took a while for me to figure out. In the meantime, I focused on my little family of three. Creating my own family within that loss was a beautiful thing. And I was about to be blessed again.

  26. I let myself get too stressed about it. It was the wrapping-paper thing I do—where I overthink how I package a gift for someone when they’re only going to tear through it to get to what matters. I overworked myself on every detail, but Eric and I did really want this wedding to be for our friends. It was a thank-you and a love letter in one, a hug back for the support they’d given us in love and in parenting. This was as much about them as it was about us.

  27. I sat on the floor of the recording studio, trying to write the story of my life so that I could help others. About the heartache of a failed marriage, of giving yourself over to someone who tortured you. Songwriting takes me to an honest place, and honestly, I was in a dark place. I just didn’t know it until the words came out of me. Before I even knew how heartbroken I was about my parents, the words spilled out of me.

  28. Finding peace with total quiet is possible, but I do still struggle with insomnia. All my fears and doubts do come once everyone is asleep and there is nobody to distract me. When thoughts come, I’ve learned that they’re okay. I can’t say I’ve made friends with them, but lying in bed I can at least shake hands with them now. Like, “Okay, I see you. I’m aware of you, and now you be aware of me. Good night.”

  29. I had to walk through my fear to be here writing to you about the painful moments of my life. “Pain is where all the tools are,” I said to my therapist the other day. If you’re someone who has a lot of tools, I’m sorry, but I am also hopeful for you. You have so much to work with. I think it’s important, whatever your situation, to turn inward. So often we turn away from ourselves, and just numb our feelings to get through the day. You can do that with anything, not just with alcohol. It’s so easy to overwhelm yourself with too much to do in a day, where you never have enough time for yourself. We need to own our weakness, our hurt, our pain, and say it out loud so that we can name what is coming up and why. You deserve it. You deserve to feel the heartbreak and the pain so that once and for all you stop holding yourself back from feeling whatever it is you’ve tried to mask.

  30. it’s not easy but you are worth the work. And if you do not have a stable presence in your life, take the time you need to become that stable presence for yourself. To find that stillness within you, no matter what storm you are in.