Unlike, say, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, John Mayer and Jessica Simpson's relationship never went down in the Hollywood hall of fame. Perhaps it's because they were pretty on-and-off during the two years they dated between 2005 and 2007 following her divorce from Nick Lachey, and only really exploded after the fact when Mayer referred to Simpson as "sexual napalm" in a 2010 interview with Playboy. While he's since apologized for the comment, we haven't heard Simpson's side of the story until People published some excerpts from her upcoming memoir Open Book that touches on her and Mayer's unstable relationship in which he was "obsessed" with her "sexually and emotionally."
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Simpson used her memoir to open up about serious topics like being sexually abused as a child and her addiction to alcohol and pills. However, her relationship with Mayer is another formative chapter of her life.
"That girl, for me, is a drug," he told Playboy in that same interview, which Simpson echoes in her memoir. What began as exchanging letters turned into a full infatuation.
“Again and again, he told me he was obsessed with me, sexually and emotionally,” she writes, but it didn't give her the confidence you might think.
“I constantly worried that I wasn’t smart enough for him,” she continued. “He was so clever and treated conversation like a friendly competition that he had to win.”
She admits that the relationship "did control" her, and she was only fully released from the infatuation after his Playboy comments.
“He thought that was what I wanted to be called. I was floored and embarrassed that my grandmother was actually gonna read that," she writes. “He was the most loyal person on the planet and when I read that he wasn’t, that was it for me. I erased his number. He made it easy for me to walk away.”
Open Book now joins Taylor Swift's "Dear John" single on John Mayer's Shelf Of Shame.
Open Book comes out February 4, 2020.