No need to check with them first. While Jessica Simpson sent her new book, Open Book, to her family before publishing it, she didn’t do the same for the men in her life — and is aware some of them may not be thrilled with what she wrote.
“I think they will be proud of my … clarity,” Simpson, 39, told Glamour in a new interview published on Tuesday, February 4, the day Open Book hit shelves. “There were so many different realizations for me, that I thought were love that actually weren’t. You know, it was like I was addicted to being wanted.”
In the memoir, the singer details her marriage to Nick Lachey, her up and down relationship with John Mayer and her public romance with Tony Romo, among others.
“When I went through the divorce [from Nick], I divorced the world—that’s how it felt to me,” she told Glamour. “As if I let people down. People looked to us as the trophy couple and I was the trophy wife, even though I didn’t know how to use the Swiffer. I tried; like, I mean I was not Betty Crocker and we all know that, but I tried.”
However, Simpson shared that anything she wrote about Lachey, 46, was handled with “as much care as possible” since he has a family. Lachey and Simpson were married from 2002 to 2005. He later married Vanessa Lachey and the pair share three children.
“There are parts of people that’s their story to tell. It’s really the marriage through my lens,” the Jessica Simpson Collection designer said. “People don’t want me lying, they want the truth from me.”
She also added, “I still have a lot of love for Nick.”
The same cannot be said for Mayer, 42, who Simpson had an on-off relationship with in 2006, which she describes in detail in the book. After going back to him nine times, she explains, the breaking point was an interview he gave to Playboy in 2010.
“That girl, for me, is a drug. And drugs aren’t good for you if you do lots of them. Yeah, that girl is like crack cocaine to me,” the crooner told the magazine at the time. “Sexually it was crazy. That’s all I’ll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm.”
Although he apologized, the Price of Beauty star refused to go back to him. “I didn’t accept his apology. I deleted all his contact information from my phone,” she wrote. “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.”
Open Book is available now.
