Reading Jessica Simpson’s Memoir Helped Me Unpack My Awkward Teenage Encounter with Her

It’s helpful to remember that all this went down in the early aughts—the time when low-rise jeans and baby tees reigned, and when a pop star’s physique seemed indelibly tied to their talent. Simpson has a four-and-a-half-octave range, but over the years, just as much attention—perhaps even more—has been paid to her figure as her singing. Who remembers the endless stories about how she got into Daisy Duke shape for the Dukes of Hazzard? Or how she became the subject of endless fat jokes after rocking “mom jeans” during a chili cook-off performance back in 2009? It took us a full decade to realize that this 2009 Vanity Fair article spent a little too much time waxing poetic about how she was “shaped like a barbell, booming on top and in the middle, skinny as a pencil in between.”

As it turns out, people’s obsession with Simpson’s body has been following her for decades. At church, she sported extra-baggy shirts and vests to hide her figure so that people wouldn’t be distracted by it while she was singing during services. Then, at 17, when then Sony president Tommy Mottola said he’d like to sign her, she was told the first thing she’d need to do was drop 15 pounds. That’s what it would take to “be Jessica Simpson,” he told her, even though at 5-foot-3 and 118 pounds, she was already a perfectly healthy weight.

That was her “crushed ice” moment, though I have no idea whether she ever actually snacked on crushed ice like I did. She turned to a strict diet and diet pills, she writes in her book, a pattern that continued for the next 20 years.

When Simpson started working on her second album, Irresistible, Mottola told her he wanted to make her a combo of Britney Spears and Mariah Carey—and that meant getting even thinner. “I started the Atkins diet hardcore, envying and resenting anybody who could just eat,” the singer writes. “Off the diet, I obsessed over how I looked 24/7; on the diet, I was also hyper-focused on food. It made me nervous.”

But it wasn’t until I read the next few lines that my perspective cracked open: “My anxiety had something to hold on to, and instead of examining my emotions, I could just block them out by focusing on carb counts and waist sizes. If I focused on controlling my outward appearance, I could avoid thinking about my emotions and fears.”

I had to put the book down for a minute. Jessica Simpson, you just took me to church! The more I thought about it, the more it spoke to me. As an awkward teen, I felt anxious about so many things (dating! the future! whether my braces would ever come off!) that I zeroed in on the one thing I thought I could control: my weight. And, in my teenage shorthand, I equated Simpson’s rising fame and success with her outward appearance. Dress for the job you want, millennial high schooler edition.

Understanding that impact as an adult was illuminating, because it’s made me more aware of looking out for those blind spots in my life today, especially as the world feels increasingly out of my control. Where do I feel the urge to channel my anxiety—or numb myself from feeling it at all—and what can I do instead? For me, that’s taking a walk, doing yoga or just journaling, stream-of-consciousness-style, to unravel my emotions as I wade through them.

In the years since, Simpson has made it a point to accept her body as it is. She may not be able to control what’s written about it, but she no longer diets for photo shoots, and she’s made it a priority to feature inclusive sizing in her fashion line, the Jessica Simpson Collection. Most important, she’s no longer conforming to other people’s ideals of what her body should be.

“I knew I needed to separate what really mattered to me and what mattered to my ego,” she writes near the end of the book. “Nobody’s words—compliments or critiques—should define the value of our souls.”