Halloween 2021, Jessica Simpson shared family photos before going trick-or-treating. Everyone looks healthy and ready for the evening’s festivities; however, Halloween 2017 was quite a different story.
In Simpson’s memoir titled “Open Book”, she explained how she realized she needed to stop drinking alcohol four years ago on Halloween. She wrote that she was so wasted that she couldn’t help her children put on their costumes, and she has no memory of who ended up helping her children get dressed. Simpson decided that she didn’t want her children to see her that way.
That night, Simpson took sleep medication to fall asleep. In the morning, she made a decision to change her life. She told a few close friends, “Something’s got to stop. And if it’s alcohol that’s doing this and making things worse, then I quit.”
Simpson recently posted a picture of herself that was taken on November 1, 2017, the day she decided to quit drinking alcohol and get help. She calls the person in the picture “unrecognizable.” She goes on to explain, “I knew in this very moment I would allow myself to take back my light, show victory over my internal battle of self respect, and brave this world with piercing clarity. Personally, to do this I needed to stop drinking alcohol because it kept my mind and heart circling in the same direction and quite honestly I was exhausted.”
In her book, Simpson explained that she was sexually abused when she was a child starting at the age of 6. She didn’t tell her parents until she was 12 years old because even though she was a victim, she still felt like she had done something wrong.
The abuse and pressure from her career drove her to alcohol as a way to cope. In the book, Simpson explains that when she finally decided to stop drinking, “Giving up the alcohol was easy. I was mad at that bottle. At how it allowed me to stay complacent and numb.” She explained that going to therapy was the real work.
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Watch the video below to hear more about “Open Book,” and to hear Simpson explain the part that was the most difficult for her to write.
