In her 2020 memoir, Open Book, Simpson was candid about her struggles with alcohol and pills, recalling her infamous “glitter cup” that she kept filled with booze.
In the book, she writes about making the decision to get sober. She’d had drinks at a Halloween party, and didn’t feel up to helping her kids get into their costumes, so she hid.
“I was terrified of letting them see me in that shape,” Simpson wrote in the memoir. “I am ashamed to say that I don’t know who got them into their costumes that night.”
She took an Ambien, then slept in the next morning to avoid facing them. She drank again. Then, friends came over and Simpson faced her journey.
“I need to stop,” she writes that she recalled saying. “Something’s got to stop. And if it’s alcohol that’s doing this and making things worse, then I quit.”
Simpson burst onto the pop scene with her first single, “I Wanna Love You Forever,” in 1999. Since then, she has sang and acted, participating in both reality TV and movies like The Dukes of Hazzard. She’s been a subject of paparazzi fascination, and recently shared that even now, she gets comments about her weight, and says that people still question her sobriety.
In a post celebrating the five-year mark last year, she wrote, “As much as I have learned to block out destructive noise…peoples’ comments and judgments can still hurt deeply with their incessant nagging ‘you will never be good enough.’”
“The most important thing I have learned through the last 5yrs without alcohol being a guard for escapism, is that I CAN and ALWAYS WILL get through it. I am capable of pretty much anything I care enough about to put my mind to.”