You're Wrong About - Quarantine Deep Dive: Jessica Simpson’s “Open Book” (Week 1)

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

Our journey through late-'90s pop stardom begins with an intervention and ends with an audition. Digressions include Willie Nelson, Ozzy Osbourne, Jane Fonda and the cast of the Mickey Mouse Club. Sarah’s English degree and exercise habits make appearances. This episode, we're sorry to say, contains descriptions of sexual abuse. Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseContinue reading →Support the show

Oh my god, I used to love Escape from Witch Mountain. That's kind of our origin story, actually. Cause it isn't like a boy and a girl are at an orphanage and they meet and they're like, we have similar thoughts. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we cheer ourselves up from terrible stories of women being abused with medium sad stories of women being abused in less devastating ways. That is my hypothesis about what this episode is. That's as good as it's going to get, medium sad.

I think we should have a universal trigger warning that's just like one of those stone heads and labyrinth that's like, turn back now. I am Michael Hobbs, I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall, I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. And we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about and lots of other places and times are tough. We have new art. We both took that in different directions. I was going to do the thing where I immediately tell people not to support us after telling people how they can support us, but go ahead.

Go ahead, you do that first. And times are tough and weird and it's chill if you don't want to support us right now. And also we have a new illustration that's just been made for us by a wonderful listener named Jenny Green. Yes. And it's just nice to look at cute cartoons. Of summer camp. Yeah. Of summer camp.

Yeah, it's a summer camp drawing. Yes, because today we are doing our second quarantine deep dive into Jessica Simpson's open book. Wait, so you want to stop calling it book club because people keep being concerned that they need to be reading along with us. Yes, we've had some confusion with the Michelle remembers book club because people thought it was like read the book and then listen to the episodes. But like these episodes are for people who have not read the book like Sarah people who are going in completely fresh. And will this also be enjoyable to people to listen to if they couldn't hold their horses and have read this book already? Yeah, it's a good book. It's also very gossipy and has like a billion celebrity cameos which are delightful and I'm going to not skip over any of them on our way through this.

Thank God. So come with us if you've read it, come with us if you haven't read it. We'll do some stuff. But anyway, today we're talking about a book that is like much easier and much more pleasant to get through even though it has dark parts. No babies are sacrificed. The sheer lack of repetitive child torture really sets it apart from its colleagues. I mean, you're wrong about book club so far. So before we start with the book, do you want to talk about your sort of current understanding of Jessica Simpson as a public figure?

I'm trying to think of when I became aware of Jessica Simpson because I very specifically remember Britney Spears' first album coming out. And then I feel like after Britney, there was this wave of what I saw accurately or not at the time as like many Britneys who were kind of released and marketed in the Britney Spears mold. And from my vantage point, Jessica Simpson was one of them. And what I most knew her for and what I feel like a lot of my peers knew her for, because I was born in 1988, was that she was like very publicly saving herself for marriage. Yes. And then she married Nick Lachey, who was in 98 degrees. Yes. And so she was a pop star and then she and Nick Lachey were the stars of newlyweds, which was a reality show that people just could not stop talking about for a brief slice of time.

I want to say like 2002, 2003. Yes. And which I have been watching all week and it is mind numbingly boring. I mean, it's really amazing. Yeah. It's interesting for being from a time when reality TV, like no one really knew how to make it and they were just trying out a whole bunch of stuff. And a lot of it really didn't work, but it was like propelled into a massive piece of the public consciousness anyway. Yeah.

And I of course remember that Jessica became known during this time for on newlyweds as I recall and I bet I'm wrong. I know where you're going. I know where you're going. The quote. So she was eating some tuna and the subject was the brand of tuna called Chicken of the Sea. Yes. And her response to Chicken of the Sea was like, is it chicken or is it fish? Yeah.

And that was taken up as evidence of the fact that she was like so stupid. Yeah. And we talked about that for weeks. Yeah. And I'm not totally sure of the timeline, but were we in a war at this time? Were we in two wars? You know. It has this sort of almost like Dan Quayle potato like quality where it's like it became the defining thing about her.

Here's the thing though. It's a confusingly named brand. Chicken of the Sea. I didn't think about that all day. I know. And the funny thing is, if I didn't have context clues telling me it was tuna, I would never think tuna is the chicken of the sea. It is not. They're huge and silvery and majestic and they're hard to catch.

Yeah. I would say a sea sponge is the chicken of the sea or like a, I'm sorry, like they did a bad job naming their product. And like, I'm very curious about why that effect became so huge because I feel like we had other stuff to talk about. There's also the thing that if somebody followed me around with a camera 24 hours a day, I would say something that stupid like four to 12 times a week. Oh yeah. We all walk around saying stupid things all day long. Yeah. It's interesting that it locked in that image of her that I think still persists.

Yeah. I also think there's a phenomenon where we kind of turn on women who became very famous. There's a way that we like to turn on them and make them pay for the attention, the positive attention they've received. Yeah. One of the things I've been thinking about is my own rejection of Britney Spears as a child and like a tween who Britney Spears was being marketed to. Because I was like very vocally not into Britney Spears. Yeah, me too. And when I think about my reasons for just like pushing her away and refusing to listen to her music.

And I don't feel like being intentionally mean about her, but being just feeling resentful of how she was being pushed at me is like what the industry had decided I was going to buy and like. And I feel like that's a reaction that I and a lot of other tweens and also a lot of adults share about these figures. And the problem is that our frustration at that model and our resentment at being pandered to doesn't tend to go to the like invisible figures of the businessmen who are deciding to market these girls and to focus group them and to dictate all of their actions. Our resentment is directed at the girls. Yeah. Yeah. For being sellouts, for being fake, for having a bad voice. We're not deserving the like insane amount of fame that they're given.

And there's also the implication that they have all this power and it's like not really like they are the focus of attention, but like they don't seem to get to decide what they do. Right. And I think it's hard for us to conceptualize and this like relates to the Marie Antoinette episode having like that much power, but like passive power. Yeah. Like you have it, but you don't, you can't really use it actively. Yeah. Like it's very strange. Yeah.

It's very hard to wrap your head around, especially when you're a tween. So funny that you bring up Britney Spears immediately after you hear the name Jessica Simpson, because this is something that follows her throughout her life. And like she has been in the shadow of Britney Spears at every single stage of her career. Sorry, Jessica. And like we will get to it, but it's like from the time she was literally 13, she was being compared to Britney Spears. Really? Oh my God. Wow.

And like not favorably, like in a way that like Britney gets everything that she wanted essentially. Yeah. She even got the bigger meltdown and like public redemption. I know. But yeah, let's dive in. Great. Okay. Tell me the Jessica Simpson story.

So we start with the prologue. The opening sentence of the book is February 19th. The kids are asleep. My husband is reading in the other room. So it's just you and me. It's Kastas and Jessica. And she does a lot of these kind of meta comments throughout the book of like, I'm telling you or like this is the kind of book where, you know, she does, she's very sort of self aware, which is actually very charming. Oh, that's really good.

In the prologue, we meet her husband, Eric Johnson, who is a former tight end for the San Francisco 49ers, which I had to look up. He's also hot as breakfast in kind of like a lumberjacky way. And she describes him as this amazing blend of athlete and hippie, a pro football player who did yoga on the sidelines at Yale while everyone else ran sprints. We also meet her kids, Ace, who is a boy who's born in 2013 and Maxwell, who's a girl who's born in 2012. The reason she's writing this book, she tells us this was supposed to be a very different book. Five years ago, I was approached to write a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life. The Jessica Simpson collection had become the top selling celebrity fashion line, the first to earn $1 billion in annual sales. Good Lord.

Here's the keynote at the Forbes Power Women's Summit and Women's Wear Daily was talking up how smart I was to make clothes that flatter all silhouettes. The deal was set. It was a lot of money and I walked away. Nobody understood why. The truth is that I don't want to lie to you. I wouldn't be honest with you if I wasn't honest with myself first. And then she gets into the fact that sort of for the last couple of years, she's been struggling with addiction. She's been struggling with her history of being abused as a child.

She's been abusing prescription medications and alcohol. And she's basically made bad choices. She says with men over and over again, she calls herself a feelings addict. And she says, for years, I occupied my time trying and failing to be the woman that the men in my life wanted me to be, which I think is a very common thing. I feel like that's a common celebrity memoir theme too. Yeah. I wonder if the sort of mechanisms of fame, especially from a young age, kind of exacerbate the experience of lacking a solid sense of self. Well, I mean, so much of becoming a celebrity when you're 17, as she did, is like you become this product that's being marketed in a way that like it's very difficult to separate who you actually are from like the person that like your parents,

who are her business managers or her parents for years, are selling to the world. And also your teenage years of years when you are kind of experimenting and figuring out who you are. Yeah. It's nice to be able to do that without a ton of attention focused on you. Right. And to just have weird phases that nobody knows about. And so that's our little hint of kind of where the book is going. The first chapter of the book takes place in Halloween of 2017, which is basically her like rock bottom.

So she starts the chapter. It's Halloween day. There's some sort of concert at her kids' school. And so she has to be there early. And so she describes waking up at 7.30 in the morning and basically reaching straight for what she calls her glitter cup, which is this like glittery sort of, you know, plastic cup or whatever that she fills with vodka. Oh, wow, the glitter cup. And like flavored Perrier and just sort of has it with her all day and starts drinking as soon as she gets up. And she says, by then I didn't care what it tasted like.

I just needed a drink every morning because I had the shakes. She arrives at the parking lot of the school to go in and watch this concert that her kids are going to be a part of. And then she runs into her dad in the parking lot. And she talks about how it's awkward because her dad was her business manager for essentially her entire career. Her parents split up in 2012 and she fired him as her business manager. So I feel like everybody has like one person that they never quite get closure on. Like that's like the central relationship that they're trying to process as adults. And for her, it's her dad.

So throughout the book, her relationship with her dad is sort of like the thing that she needs to resolve. And so she talks about her history with her dad that one of the things he used to tease her about when she was a kid was that she was an accident. Oh my God. And he would like joke that like, oh, she's a busted condom. But he spins it as like, so that's how we knew that like God had a purpose for her is because like we didn't intend her to be there. But it's like, it's one of those things that's like quote unquote a funny story. But it's also like not that funny. I think there are a lot of families where like the parents decide what is allegedly funny.

And then the kids have to kind of grow up and leave the household before one day they're like, wait, I don't find that funny. I find that hurtful. Yeah. And so she talks about how apparently in sex ed as a kid, they were talking about how like condoms are only 99% effective. And I guess she stands up in class and says, I'm the 1% and it can happen to you. So make sure you're abstinent. That's like an earnest thing to do. Yeah.

And it's also it's also her as like a God warrior from like the earliest days that she's like the only safe way to do this is to not have sex. Yeah. I shouldn't exist. Yeah. Don't do it. Oh. And so, you know, she bumps into her dad in the parking lot. They're chatting a little bit.

And as they're making small talk, she can see his face kind of changed to this like look of pity. And she can see that he can smell the vodka on her breath. She talks about how sort of the way that she deals with her dad because he's like this natural born salesman, natural born talker. He's a preacher. So he's very extroverted. And so the way that she sort of deals with these awkward moments with her dad is just like get him talking. She says, I got dad talking about the new car and his photography hobby and business, which he could talk about for hours. It was how I negotiated a lot of conversations with people at that time.

I listened to every word, but only chimed in now and again to keep them going. Like it's a way of sort of making herself invisible in conversations, which I think is another sign of like depression and anxiety of a way of you just don't want to be seen by anybody even when you're talking to them. Oh, yeah. And relying on people to just fill any empty space, which a lot of people will reliably do for you. So she goes to the concert. It goes well. She comes back home. We learn in the first random celebrity detail we get that she lives in Ozzy Osbourne's house, which I think is probably the house where they filmed like that Osbourne's reality show.

I was at the Osbourne's, which was also huge. Yeah. And like, I remember having discussions about that with my freshman year history teacher. She mentions it as like, oh, we had to redecorate because like his decoration is different than ours. Too many headless bats. Not my style. I like something with more of a chip and Joanna vibe. And so the scene here is basically what sets up her intervention and sort of hitting rock bottom.

She's been working on all these songs for months. Her father has not heard them. He comes over to the house because they're having a Halloween party later that day. And so she's got all these people coming over to the house and so she wants her dad to come over to listen to a couple of her songs before everybody else arrives. So she invites him over and apparently a lot of the songs on this album are about him because she's been dealing with like firing him and with the divorce and everything else. And so she plays him a song called Practice What You Preach, which is basically just like a diss track about her dad, essentially, just like everything that she's mad about. So this is like her rumors. Yeah.

I looked at the lyrics online. It says, you taught me how to love somebody just like you. You taught me how to leave somebody and it's hard to do. You said, keep my shit together when the world unravels and put a brave face on in the heat of battle. So that's what I did. So it's not as like mean to him as sort of she makes it sound in the text, but it's like it's very clearly like about him. But it seems like he sort of doesn't pick up on it because he listens to it and he's like, that's really good. That's great.

That's like if Stevie Nicks played Dreams to Lindsay Buckingham and he was like, nice chord progression, Stevie. This is good work. And so he just says like, I'm really proud of it. I'm sad that I can't be the one going out there promoting it, but I'm really proud of you and really happy for you. And it's just like this outpouring of support and she's just like, OK. Yeah. And for whatever reason, this kind of triggers a breakdown. I totally get that.

Really? Yes. If you're like trying to communicate to someone like, please see me, please see how I feel and are using like the best of your abilities, like the most of your artistic abilities, like putting your heart and soul into your work and then you offer it to them. And they're like, oh, good job, honey. I can see myself going on like a cookie punching rampage, all of Bridesmaids. Yeah, because I think it's like you want it to be this cathartic moment and he's just like, good song, Tiger. Good stuff.

Yeah, it's tough. It's like if you expect to have some kind of emotional catharsis and then it's just suddenly not there, that can be kind of a claustrophobic experience. And so he leaves and she just immediately starts crying and kind of curls up into a ball on the porch. And this begins one of the trends we're going to see throughout this book, which is very interesting. And I don't think she's all that aware of that all of her friends are like people who work for her. Hmm. That seems like a common celebrity problem.

Oh, yeah. In a way that I think is invisible to them too. I think it just becomes normal after a while. But so she's crying out on the porch. She hears somebody say, are you okay? And she says, it was our house manager, Randy. He was my dad's best friend when I was a kid. His wife, Beth, was my dance teacher in fifth grade.

Then my choreographer on tour and now she runs my clothing line. Wow. So not just her friends, but like people from her parents' friends. Yes. Yeah. It's like this mixture of like family and business and friendship. She constantly blurs these lines with people in her life. But also you can't fire a guy you've known since fifth grade.

Totally. And so this guy, Randy, asks if she's okay and she's like, I'm not okay. It's kind of all hitting her at once, like the drinking, she's not sleeping. She's been taking prescription stimulants and then taking Ambien to sleep. Oh, she's a little cutie garland. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she's just kind of trying to keep her anxiety at bay and just kind of getting

through the next day, basically. Yeah. And also I love, as we've discussed before, the strange comedy that reality provides in the middle of tragic events. As she's having this breakdown, as like she's going through the rest of the day, just feeling like absolute shit and just like completely breaking down on the inside. For much of this scene, she is dressed like Willie Nelson. What?

Oh, because of its costume? Yeah, because it's Halloween. Oh. We also get, her and Willie Nelson were in a movie together, they were in. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's a hazard. Yeah. Sorry.

I wanted to say it before you said it. I've got a chance to demonstrate my knowledge. We all call each other by our character names, Daisy and Uncle Jesse. He and his wife are my role models for marriage. My own marriage was collapsing during that time, and on set I hung out in his trailer, let him see through the happy face I put on for people. Now and then through the years, just when I needed it, he would text me a simple, I love you Daisy, love Uncle Jesse.

It's like, oh, Willie Nelson. That's really wonderful. That's really wonderful. So this is also the first time we get another pattern that happens throughout this book where she says something that's deeply relatable and deeply unrelatable at the same time. So in this day where she's basically having this emotional breakdown panic attack, she's been drinking, she feels terrible, she's just like, I'm not okay, something is deeply wrong with me.

It's Halloween and she has to get ready for this party. They're doing social media pictures where she has to smile. She's got hair and makeup people helping her with this Willie Nelson wig. She says, as I turned to go inside, Eric announced we were all going trick-or-treating. All the kids at the party yelled in excitement and I shrank. I forgot this had been the plan. We'd rented golf carts to take everyone around the gated community where we live. Eric, I can't, I whispered.

What do you mean you can't? He said, he had been shouldering much of the party hosting on his own that day. There was frustration in his voice. We got like 20 golf carts. I can't. Just get on the golf cart, he said. We're going to go trick-or-treating. I'm just going to sit down for a while.

It's one of those things where it's not wanting to go through with a plan that you made is deeply relatable. I can't do this thing that I've already committed to. The fact that what she can't do is ride around on golf carts throughout their gated community trick-or-treating. Another example of this unrelatable and relatable thing that I highlighted from another chapter is that she's talking about how singing has always been something separate from her family. They're not really in that part of her life. That's nice. She says, my kids had never even seen me perform.

The only time Eric had seen me sing in front of an audience was when I was promoting my second Christmas album in 2010, but that had been on a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade float surrounded by dancing muffins and gingerbread men. Dancing muffins. Again, there's this part of your life that your family doesn't get, this weird hobby that you have. Also, it's like her actual example of that is like, oh, I was singing on the float at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Yeah, but what you take away is like, oh, right. This doesn't seem super amazing to you because you're used to performing at huge American institutions. You're like, so it was a float.

It wasn't super voice oriented. Right. She's having this breakdown. She's got all these people coming over to her house. She basically just checks out. She takes to Ambien. She goes to sleep. I think like maybe in a guest house or like an upstairs bedroom or something like the logistics are not clear,

but she basically just like doesn't show up to her own party and just like goes to sleep. And then she says, here I would like to tell you that I got up early the next day and got my kids to school. I did not. I slept in afraid to see them and hoping Eric would tell them I wasn't feeling well. She's basically, she's having like a sort of depression episode where she basically just can't get out of bed. And so this is the day that she has like a weekly get together with her three best friends. I'm going to read you her three best friends. This is really interesting.

The first is her publicist, Lauren. The second is her friend, Casey, who she met when she signed with Columbia Records in 1997. And third is Coco, her personal assistant. She's also flying in a hair colorist. So she's planning on sort of multitasking and she wants to get her hair colored, but she also wants to hang out with her friends. So she's just like having everybody over at once. And basically, like as these four people are all there, she basically says like,

just bleach my hair. I don't give a fuck anymore. And so they can sort of see that she's like breaking down. And so Casey, one of her friends says, Jessica, why do you think you drink so much? I mean, according to her, like she was never hiding this like this thing with the glitter cup. Everyone could see it. And they basically tell her that like, we have been planning for this for six months. Like we've seen how bad the drinking is.

And they've called a doctor who I guess specializes in like celebrity rehabs, where like you can't go to like a rehab clinic because then the paparazzi will find out. So like they do sort of inpatient rehab, but it's like in your house. And so again, this is all very strange because they're having this like really deep conversation. Like as this person is coloring her hair. And then as they're getting sort of deeper into like the logistics of like this intervention and her quitting drinking and what it's going to look like. Her extensionists come to put in her hair extensions.

So there's now like nine people in this room. This is like a Fellini film. Like more and more hair professionals keep coming in this like clown car of a salon wall. You're having this like your life bus open and you accept what's coming out. And so eventually the doctor gets there. Everyone's crying. There's like all these people in the house. Everyone sort of being very supportive and her husband says, well, I'm going to quit drinking too.

And so the therapist finally gets there and they sit down in this sort of alcove in their house, like just the two of them. And the doctor says, so let's talk about what brought you to this point. Oh, yeah. That's that's the end of chapter. And then we rewind to June of 1982. Yes, I'm so excited. So we smash cut back to 1982.

She says she's two years old, but this scenario seems like she would be older. She is in the car with her mom. She's in the back seat. Her mom is driving. She's kind of bored and she stands up in the back seat and she sort of tries to hug her mom from the back and ends up like covering her eyes accidentally and sort of like moving her arms and her mom in response kind of jerks her hand and ends up driving the car into the oncoming lane and has a head on collision with another car. Oh my God.

And they're both flung from the vehicle. The injuries are really grizzly. She ends up in the hospital for a week. Yeah. And so after she gets out of the hospital, apparently she has a stutter. There's some sort of head injury, brain damage. And she says the feeling of stuttering is like all of the words want to come out at once. And her aunt Connie happens to be a speech therapist and her aunt Connie says, well,

if you can't get something out by talking, why don't you try singing? Oh, like in a fish called Wanda. Yes. And so for the next two years, she starts singing whenever she wants to get something out. And this is how she finds her interest in song. Wow. That's really, that's such an origin story. That's really great.

Right. And so as this is happening, she's a really shy kid. She's also got the stutter. Her family, she says, moves 18 times before the fifth grade. Oh my gosh. And like in the same geographic area or like all over the place. Yeah. They start in, she's born in Fort Worth, Texas, and they mostly move around in Texas.

But then there's this weird thing where they end up moving to Littleton, Colorado in 1985. And then she says, I think my dad was escaping something. Hmm. And then she says that her dad also left the church. So they were quite poor when she was growing up. She talks about how when she was delivered in the hospital, they couldn't pay the medical bill. So they gave the doctor a camera lens. Wow.

It sounds like something that would have happened in like the 1850s, but this would have been 1980. I can see that happening. And her dad, it's interesting. Her dad is like a preacher, but then he sort of goes in and out of preaching depending on like the job market. Huh. He's a fair weather preacher or a foul weather preacher, maybe. Yeah. And then like what, what denomination are they and stuff like that?

Baptist. Like born again. But then, you know, he's selling at one point like choir implements. He's selling like postal scales. I don't know if that's like door to door, but it sort of seems like something you would sell door to door because it's like not something people need. But times are so bad, they actually end up declaring bankruptcy when she's five or six. And they end up moving back to Fort Worth because her dad gets a job in a church. And this is when once her dad starts working at the church, her mom starts doing exercise tapes.

Oh, wow. This is like peak Jane Fonda times. Oh yeah. Like 80, what, 84? 85, 86. When is this? Yeah. Because Jane Fonda brought the VCR into the consumer market because she released an exercise tape.

And suddenly it was like this incredibly expensive VCR is going to amortize out really well when I do my Jane Fonda workout every day. Yeah. Really? Good workout. Yeah. The advanced workout is grueling. Do you want to guess what Jessica Simpson's mom calls her exercise company? Moves with Christ.

Close. Heavenly bodies. Yes. It's pretty good. That's so weird. I love it. I appreciate the Christians who are like really into like kind of puns and bad taste as expressions of their faith. It's like, you're having fun with it.

I appreciate that. It's also very smart marketing because her class is called Jump for Jesus, right? And all of the music in the program is like Christian music. So it's like Amy Grant. It's also a good idea because like honestly when you're doing the cardio portion of an exercise tape, like I imagine if I were inspired to do difficult things for Jesus generally, like Jesus could inspire me to do more jumping jacks. Yeah. It's also a lot of reaching for the sky and exercise. And like going for the burn, which could integrate well into a Catholic workout tape, but I haven't heard of those as a thing.

And it's also very candy marketing because when they go to like conferences or when they visit other churches, she'll take like a stack of video tapes with her and sell these workout tapes. So it becomes like an extra source of income for them when her dad is not making that much as a preacher. So is he aspiring to be like a, like to have a large congregation and to be a known entity and stuff like that? Yes. I mean, both her mom and her dad are very ambitious. Okay. So eventually he becomes a preacher at a mega church. Oh, wow.

And also, I mean, this is a really interesting aspect of this that she says, with the same fervor that my mom now flips houses, my parents fixed people throughout my childhood. We took in people who were sick or neglected and it wasn't always fun. Sometimes it was a chore to share my parents with others. And as a fellow preacher's kid, this is a thing that like preachers do. Like as a preacher, you're this like very well known member of this large community. And so she talks about how like when people would get pregnant and like get kicked out from their parents, they would come and live at Jessica Simpson's house. Wow. Or like when people were going through drug stuff, they would come to their house and detox.

And so this idea of just having like kind of random people around is something that like characterizes her childhood. And I've heard a lot from other preachers kids too, that it's just like you're sort of expected to be this kind of savior figure. Right. That also reminds me of the way Louisa May Alcott grew up because her father was a transcendentalist. And so she was raised in this ethos of like, we must give up little pleasures for ourselves because they don't really matter. And they don't feel as good as doing nice things for other people. And you can see, you know, in her writing, the kind of tension between like, yeah, you know, that's true. And we should try and emulate that.

But like, I wanted that little cake I had to give away when I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's something interesting of like how much responsibility these preachers end up taking on. Yeah. And what kind of a safety net they become in a culture that has a lack of other safety nets, especially I can imagine in the Dallas Fort Worth area in the 80s. I mean, she does say like, in the South, there are so many secrets and my parents were there to give people a safe place. And so a lot of the kind of shame and banishment that comes along with these traditional mores, it's like her parents are the dustpan for all that.

Like they have to clean that up and like try to make people whole. I mean, they talk about a girl who lives with them for six weeks, who has like postpartum depression. She's like a teenager who just had a kid and she's like totally not functional after she had this kid. And they just like nurse her back to health in their house for six weeks and take care of her baby. Wow. Like she's five, six years old at this point. Right. It's very interesting to think about being a child.

Like the first things that come to mind for me thinking about my own like five year old self is a not knowing what the kind of emotional tone of the house will be from day to day. Yeah. And also not knowing how much of your parents' attention you're going to be able to get. And also it's crazy to me that she mentions her dad's salary at this time is $25,000 a year. Oh my God. So like there's been inflation since then, but not that much inflation. Like that's not a great salary. And also how many children do they have total?

At this point they have two because her sister's born in 1984. Okay. So there's also, this part's really cringy, but like I don't want to cut it out. We have to talk about it. We have to experience people as they are. I know. This part is just like, it's like Jessica. Can I guess, is this like cringy and like a race relation related way?

Yes. How did I know? Yeah. I think you can tell from my voice. I think I have like a specific like white people doing race stuff. I can tell the different flavors of your cringing voice. It's just like, right. So this is where, I don't know why she puts it at this particular part of the book, but she talks about how her great grandmother, people in the family call her a quote unquote full-blooded Indian.

But like the tribe is never mentioned. Like it never gets more specific than that. I've looked into this. Other people have like looked at their family tree, like the public records that are available and all of her great grandparents are Caucasian. But it's basically that like her great grandmother was like, she did tarot cards. You know, like Native Americans. This is, this is why it's so cringy is because she talks about how she's like mystical and intuitive. Tarot cards for the record were invented, I believe, in 17th century Italy.

But anyway. This is the worst passage of this cringiness. She says, I'd stare in the mirror at my brown eyes and high cheekbones convinced I was Native American. More than that, we Simpson girls, my mother included, all seemed a little witchy. She talks about how she's like intuitive and she's a good sense of people. Which is what every girl thinks about herself. Yeah. And I feel like to me, the problem with this sort of Jessica Simpson spin on it and this very common spin on it that I can most readily identify is like, that's nice that that does that for you emotionally.

But like, you can just watch Teen Witch. Yeah. And be like, maybe I'm like the Teen Witch girl and I'm made special by this special part of my heritage that doesn't involve me appropriating or projecting my own internal narratives and emotional needs onto a culture that I have probably nothing to do with and know nothing about. Well, I think it's one of those things where like, you know, you accept the stories about your family that you're told. Right. But it is interesting in a book published in 2019. Yeah.

It's a it's a thought fantasy that is unfortunate because it's and it's yeah. And again, it's like there's other ways to make that thought feel real for yourself and to tell yourself that your special that don't infringe on other people's culture. Right. And like misrepresent them as witchy rather than like having specific beliefs that are not just like fortune telling. Like that's not. Right. Like general vague new age genus. Yeah.

Which is like, yeah. The point is like it's it's just I don't know. I think it's it's important for all of us to learn to see ourselves as as special without any kind of genealogical justification for it. Yeah. I'm into that. Yeah. Let's do that. And so now we get to the abuse.

Oh, great. The abuse is actually really interesting in a way that we're not very well set up as a society to talk about. So do you remember in the sex offenders episode how I mentioned that a significant percentage, I think it's one third of children who are sexually abused before they hit puberty. So very young children are abused by other children. Yeah, I do remember you saying that. So apparently there's a family that they hang out with family friends. They live in a different city. It's some hours long drive to go see them.

They only see them three, four times a year. This female friend is seven. Jessica is six. Whenever they visit this family, they always sleep over. And so when she's six, this girl starts abusing her. This is what Jessica says. After lights out, I would feel her hands on me. It would start with tickling my back and then going into things that were extremely uncomfortable.

Freezing became my defense mechanism. To this day, when I panic, I freeze. The second time she abused me, it was during a spring visit and Ashley, my sister, also shared the bed. I lay between them, fiercely protecting my sister from this monster. I didn't want her to feel as disgusting as I felt. And so this happens for six years. Oh my God. And she talks about trying to protect her sister from it.

That she would sort of let it happen to her as a way of keeping it from happening to her sister. Which I feel like is also a dynamic that happens a lot. Yeah. She says, She continued to try to sleep next to my little sister and I would scooch Ashley over and get between them whenever she did. I never let her near Ashley, but I also never screamed or told her to stop. I was confused, wondering if it was something that I wanted to keep going. Why am I not telling anyone, I would ask myself.

Is it because it feels good? The irony is that I was protecting my abuser. I thought if I named what she was doing, she would feel the shame I felt. And I wouldn't have wished that on anybody. I mean, when this is happening, this is when she basically can't sleep. She talks about how from this point on, she basically never has a good night's sleep. She says, Even at home in my own bed, there was a feeling that I had to stay up to keep watch.

I stopped waiting for Ashley to come to my room and started sleeping in her bed. I remember the humiliation of saying to my baby sister four years younger than me, Ashley, can I share your room? Even then I would lie awake waiting for my brain to shut off. And so she starts taking sleeping pills when she's 12 or 13 to get to sleep. And this is a pattern that continues throughout her life. And one of the things, I mean, another thing we mentioned in that episode was that the vast, vast, vast majority of children who abuse other children are themselves being abused.

So this girl talks about how there's an older boy. We don't know the circumstances who's molesting her. And so she'll tell Jessica about this and then abuse Jessica. And so it's just complicated. Like it's just one of these things like we're very uncomfortable talking about these things unless there's like someone we can punish. And unless there's a very clear binary between victim and villain. And that's something that we become deprived of in real life situations.

And this is the appeal of Michelle not to drag us back into that dungeon again. But right. I mean, the idea that, you know, who would abuse a child? Well, Satan. Right. You know, it's not complicated. It's not a situation where we have to contemplate the damage that another traumatized child is capable of carrying out and being like, well, how do we address this?

Like we can't put her on a registry and decide that she's a sex criminal. I mean, this is why trauma studies is so important and why I think it's acceptance into any kind of a legal framework is so delayed because if you look at trauma as an experience that begets difficult and potentially traumatizing behaviors, then suddenly everything is much more complicated and takes a lot longer. And you have to think about how do we help a child to heal from the experience of being abused in a way that will make them safe for other children to be around as opposed to just assuming that they're going to get better if we punish their abuser.

Yeah. In some zombie lore, you can turn zombies back to humans by like killing the original zombie or the same thing with vampires. Would that work so? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't think it is. So I mean, like to her great credit, Jessica grapples with this a little bit. She says, I can't play armchair psychiatrist and guess what her motives were for abusing

me, but I can feel her pain and mine at the same time. And that's like actually a pretty good summary of this, that it's like, there's just enough pain to go around here. It sucks. It's just a sucky situation. Yeah. Yeah. Jessica also says, I came to understand sex and my body solely in terms of power, or in

this case, lack of power. I was just going to let her do whatever it was she wanted to do because I didn't want to hurt her feelings, which is devastating. I mean, like, ah, I don't know. It just so it hurts to like read that out loud. Yeah. Yeah. And so after this goes on for six years, she tells her parents.

So they have a thing where her dad buys Lotto tickets and Jessica and Ashley are like his lucky little girl. So he always lets them scratch off the Lotto tickets. And so as they're driving home from this family, it's like some number of hours drive. They stop at a gas station, get a bunch of Lotto tickets. They're in the back seat. Jessica and Ashley, Ashley has her headphones on so she can't hear what anybody's talking about.

And Jessica has these Lotto tickets in her hands. And she just tells her parents. She says, if you don't know what's been going on, she's been touching me for years and it makes me really uncomfortable and I don't ever want to go back there. My mother slapped my father's arm at the back of her hand. I told you something was happening. She yelled at him. Neither turned to look at me.

And so that's the last time they talk about it. There's no further conversation. And so Jessica's like expecting her parents to say something. At one point she's like, hello, but they're just sitting there quietly. And so she just sort of slinks back into the seat and she starts, she's bored. So she starts scratching the little decals off of the Lotto ticket and then she wins. She wins $1,500. Oh my God.

And it's like, oh my God, we won. They turn around and they go back to the gas station and it becomes this thing. And it becomes like a happy story that the family tells. Like, wow, that one time that you won $1,500. But like they never bring this up ever again. And then that also reminds me of her playing the song for her dad and him being like, great work. It's just like you're trying to show your parent what you really need from them.

And they just like, choose to be distracted, maybe. That's a good point. Like, yeah, they're turning it into a different story than the one you want them to be hearing. So we now cut forward to spring of 1993. It's one year later. Her father is now the pastor of this mega church. He's making $60,000 a year. Her mom is still teaching aerobics.

She is singing in the choir. Her parents start entering her in singing competitions. Not quite star search, but I think like regional variations on star search. And she always sings Christian songs. They're making more money, but they're not like by any means rich. Her mom does this thing where she'll buy her outfits for these singing competitions and then leave the tags on and then return them the next day. And so she's 13 years old.

She reads in the newspaper about an audition for the Mickey Mouse Club in Dallas. I feel like Mickey Mouse Club was like the incubator for like every big pop star of the late 90s. Everyone. So the big stars at this point are Carrie Russell and J.C. Shazae. J.C. from Something Something. He will be in the Backstreet Boys or in Sink or something later. In Sink, I think. Okay.

So apparently 50,000 kids show up to this open call audition in Dallas. Wow. Apparently what they do for the audition is you sing a song. You can pick a song and you sing the song. That's like part of the test. And then they make you do freestyle dance. So like you just have to dance to a song. Like it's not choreographed.

It's just you like dancing around. I bet that's when they cut the single largest number of kids. Yes, I know. Because that sounds, that's like a dream I've had. Like a dance for me. And then they play a song. That's a nightmare. If I had done that as a child, I would have probably done a service a little job singing a song.

And then I would have just danced like Crispin Glover on Friday the 13th for like it would not look good. So apparently she sings Amazing Grace. She does great. And then they make her dance to Ice Ice Baby. And she dances to it. And I guess impresses because out of these 50,000 kids, they only call 10 back and she is one of them. Wow. And so she comes back the next day.

There's more audition stuff that she gets through. The last stage of the audition is like a boot camp sort of thing in Orlando. So the last stage is going to send her to Orlando for two weeks. Wow. There's going to be a big performance at the end of it. And like that's like the audition. Wow. Okay.

So question. Is she or do we know if she is like, Mom, Dad, can I audition for the Mickey Mouse Club, please? Or like, or what? It's interesting. It's not clear. She, she sort of writes around to what extent she is driving this versus her parents driving this. I think it's actually an interesting thing of like, can you really tell what a kid wants for themselves when they're 13 years old? Or versus like what their parents want for them.

Or like, if you as their parent want something for them, like, can you reliably tell if they truly individually wanted or if they are to some significant degree humoring you and feeling worried about how you would feel if they did. Exactly. The thing they understand you want them to do. Yes. So at these sort of extra auditions in Dallas, they tell her like, look, you're invited to Orlando. We're really excited about you. But you really need to work on your acting. Like your acting is not great.

So we are going to send you to, I'm not making this up, the Chuck Norris acting school. Right? That's amazing. Apparently they filmed Walker, Texas Ranger in Dallas, Fort Worth. And like he had an acting school there. And I also feel like Chuck Norris makes sense to me as a person who teaches people to act like enough because he's a martial arts guy who then went into acting. So I feel like he's a good person for knowing like, this is how you do a movie. Like let this, it's not rocket science.

Like this is what acting is basically. Like we don't have to try and climb Mount Everest today. We can take a nice little hike up acting mountain. This is literally exactly what he does. Do you want to hear what his acting advice is? Yes. Okay. A thousand times.

Yes. So the first day Chuck didn't say much to me, but the next time I went, he had some notes. He stopped me in the middle of my one-on-one. Do you know who the most powerful actor in the world is? Greta Garbo. Not where he's going with this. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to say Chuck Norris. Denzel Washington, he said.

Oh yeah. Denzel is a very subtle face actor. Oh, I said, every person in the room nodded in agreement, which is what other people did whenever Chuck spoke. And then Chuck Norris says, do you know why? This time he didn't wait for me to answer. He just turned and grabbed a green roll of scotch tape. Denzel can say anything without moving his eyebrows, he said.

So Jessica, I'd like you to try something. And so apparently they do the same scene, but he tapes her fucking eyebrows onto her face so she can't move them while she's acting. And she says, like, this worked. That's all Chuck Norris was doing for his entire career, was just deliberately not moving his eyebrows during scenes. I feel like that relates to gender expectations, though.

And I wonder if Chuck Norris is aware of that. He, 100%, is not aware of that, Sarah. But I think that you're correct about the gender stuff. Chuck Norris does not know that, Sarah. I think it is itself a counter-deception for you to assume that Chuck Norris is not thinking about gender. I'm the real sexist. I agree.

So apparently she learns to act, and then she goes to Orlando where the first night there's a pool party at whatever hotel they're staying at, and she meets Carrie Russell and JC Chasse. We also meet, she says, there was one boy running around the pool completely on, like he knew the audition finals had already started. He kept doing backflips into the pool,

totally grabbing everyone's attention. He eventually came over to where I was standing. Hi, I'm Justin Timberlake, he said. Yeah! Why am I so excited? Is this how you feel as you get older? You're like, something I remember! There's also, right away, another boy appeared.

He was there with his mom all the way from Canada. Do you want to guess who this is? Canada. Is he in a boy band? He's in, like, the opposite of a boy band. Wait, do I know this? You might not even know that he was on the Mickey Mouse Club, Ryan Gosling.

Oh, I did know that, but, like, very in the way back of my mind that I might not have been able to access. Yeah, that's such a weird combination of people, like Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling. No, and then we also get, then there was Christina Aguilera, this timid, frankly kind of mousy girl

in glasses from Pittsburgh. She was so tiny that I didn't really get how she could possibly get on television. Wait, did Christina Aguilera used to be, like, thumbelina-sized and then she had a growth spurt before she did all that promo for Mulan? I mean, as a fellow tiny person, I feel very targeted by this.

There's also an extremely adorable scene where it seems like Jessica Simpson's parents are not, like, showbiz parents yet, but all of the other parents of these kids are, like, super-duper showbiz parents. So, apparently, Jessica's mom is chatting with Justin Timberlake's mom. Oh, he's been singing at this competition.

He's been on, like, this commercial. He was on this stage play and this. And so, apparently, Justin Timberlake's mom is, like, oh, so, like, what has she been on? And Jessica's mom has a folder, like, a little portfolio with her with Jessica's school photo and her grades. That's, like, all she has.

Oh, that's so... Wow, I love that she's, like, the people at Disney need to know that Jessica got a B-plus in geology. That will move them. That's literally what she says. That's in the text. Really? Yeah, she has a B-plus in English.

Oh, that's really... That's sweet. Oh, wow. Kid Stardom is just, like, the most poignant thing in the world, isn't it? I feel weird about it. She talks about how Ryan Gosling is her first crush. I mean, she certainly is a trail breaker in that way.

Yes. She also learns that there's 11 kids at this boot camp, and eight of them are going to be on the Mickey Mouse Club. Wow. So, like, those are good odds. Yeah. One of the casting directors is, like, look, you guys should start looking for real estate in Orlando.

Like, it's difficult to find apartments like you guys should start looking, because, like, come on, you're kind of a lock. And then halfway through the boot camp, they're doing all this practice, they're getting ready for their final tryouts, and Jessica says, and then another girl walked into the theater.

Oh, no. From now on, all about Eve. She had these big, beautiful eyes, brown, like mine. I heard her talk, and she was southern, like me. I heard an, oh, my goodness, come out of her, and I knew she had to be a Baptist choir girl, too. Hi, Brittany, said Matt, the casting director. Hello, sir, she said, and he laughed.

And you can just hear the, like, inception horn, like, blah, like. Oh, my God. Brittany has entered the chat. Immediately, Jessica feels like she's in her shadow. It's very clear to everyone that, like, Brittany Spears is just a star. Nobody had her work ethic in the 90s.

No. I mean, no one. And so they get to these last day tryouts. Everything comes down to this performance. They have to do singing and acting and choreography, like this whole sort of package of showing the Disney people what they can do. And very unfortuitously,

Jessica is scheduled right after Christina Aguilera. Oh, imagine singing a song after Christina Aguilera. I know. Oh, my God. So, Jessica is scheduled after Christina Aguilera, who knocks it out of the park. And so she's just hella rattled. And then she sings an Amy Grant song,

and she apparently flubs a note or two. And then she gets in her head where she's like, well, singing is the part that comes easy to me. Singing is the part that I'm supposed to be really good at. And I'm fucking up the singing. So that just, like, totally spins her around. And the rest of the audition, she's, like, forgets lines. And she gets her choreography wrong.

And it's apparently just, like, an absolute disaster. Like, nobody claps afterwards. Like, she blows it. And this is the worst part, potentially. She's walking offstage. And Justin Timberlake is going up next. And he goes, oh, what did you do? Justin?

I know. I wrote, fuck Justin Timberlake in my little Kindle Mozart after that. And also, I mean, I consider myself a little bit of a Justin Timberlake scholar, but I also looked into him for the Janet Jackson episode. He's not being depicted in a flattering light so far in our show, is he?

It gets worse. On my Kindle, I wrote, you, you, you, you, you after this. So she's talking about later on the next time she sees Justin Timberlake, it's, like, 10,000 years later. They're both living on the ice planet hot. She has gotten divorced from Nick Lachey. He is single. And so they end up hanging out somehow.

They bump into each other, whatever. They're hanging out. They're drinking. And they end up making out. And as soon as this happens, he pulls away and gets his phone out. What? And she's like, what?

And he goes, oh, I got to call Ryan Gosling. No. She's like, why? And he's like, we made a bet at the casting camp of who was going to kiss you first and I win. That's mean. That's really adolescent. I would certainly hope that if Ryan Gosling

received this call, he was like, dude, what? Seriously? That bet we made when we were 12? Fuck off, Justin Timberlake. Yeah. He's like, excuse me, I'm considering which Oscar grab role to get. I also looked this up and about this phone call

from Justin Timberlake to Ryan Gosling, Timberlake denies that it happened. So journalistic ethics require me to note that he denies that it happened. We have not heard from Gosling. So we do not know that side of the story. Maybe he had Justin Timberlake blocked by that or was just like screening all his calls

and was just like, I got to it eventually and then just kind of forgot. So digression over, Jessica, we find out, this is really heartbreaking, we find out that Jessica's audition for the Mickey Mouse Club was so bad that they only took seven kids into the Mickey Mouse Club. Like they specifically changed the number

so they wouldn't have to take her. Wow. Yeah. And so she cries for days. Yeah. And how old is she? 13 at this point. Oh my God.

It's a lot for a 13-year-old, man. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot for anyone at any age. I mean, seriously. And that's where we're going to stop. That's another little rock bottom moment. For Jessica.

And next episode, we're going to hear more about her music career. We're going to hear about Nik Lashay. We're going to meet some other trash dudes. Yeah. But right now we're going to leave Jessica crying in her bedroom after getting rejected by the Mickey Mouse Club and not knowing how to proceed.

That is a really manipulative cliffhanger. And I applaud your mercenary use of it. I'm not sorry. I just want everyone to know. I'm going to do more of these. I'm excited for our glass bottom boat tour of 90s trash pop star boys. If you think Willie Nelson, Ozzy Osbourne

are like weird cameos, just wait. Just wait. It's going to get so good. I also do hope that Willie Nelson comes back. I feel like he's like the fairy godfather of all this. I can neither confirm nor deny. Yeah. What are your closing thoughts?

What are your reflections? We've talked a lot about celebrity memoirs on this show and how they can be many different kinds of literature. And I think the reaction that I've seen people having to this book so far without having read it myself is one that seems to be really empathetic and maybe to be helping us to create a culture where more girls don't have to go through

what Jessica went through. And I'm hopeful about what we're going to learn to avoid perpetuating the sins of all these jerks in the 90s. Yeah. If Justin Timberlake calls, don't pick up. I think that's number one primary lesson. I am blocking Justin Timberlake. I am straight up blocking him.

Ghost him. Ghost him.