Joanna JoJo Levesque reveals that most of her childhood was spent at church basements. At the same time, her parents, her mom, Diana, and her late father, Joel, attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in her memoir Over the Influence.
As per her memoir, her parents met in AA. Her mother, Diana, was an alcoholic, and her father, Joel, used pills. They separated when she was 5, and JoJo moved in with her mother.
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While her estranged dad struggled with relapsing, her mother Diana took a manager job but struggled with addiction.
While talking to PEOPLE in an article published on September 17, JoJo revealed that for a while, she thought she'd never be like her parents,
"For a while, I was super self-righteous and thought I'd never be like my parents. I was like, 'No, because I'm the strongest. I'm wicked strong. But then I was like, 'Oh, what I'm doing is better or worse. I'm my parents' child, and I need to be awake to what's happening within myself."
JoJo looks back on growing up
In the memoir, JoJo looks back at her experience of growing up around parents who struggled with addiction, getting addicted to s*x herself, and how achieving fame in childhood affected her life.
In the memoir, JoJo mentions that she first participated in a photo shoot at the age of 12 and became very critical of her looks after seeing the images, leading her to resort to self-harm. She became used to sucking in her stomach or feeling faint while singing.
This isn't the first time Joanna has opened up about her struggles against addiction. While speaking to Uproxx in February 2020, the singer spoke about going through body image issues.
When the singer was 18, she sat down in the (now defunct Blackground Records) office, and the president of the label said, "We just want you to look as healthy as possible." Joanna responded that she looked like the "picture of health", a healthy girl who is active and eats, and asked if he was asking her to be "really skinny." She then consulted a nutritionist who put her on a "500 calorie a day diet",
"I was on these injections that make you have no appetite. I was like, 'Let me see how skinny I can get, because maybe then they'll put out an album. Maybe I'm just so disgusting that no one wants to see me in a video that they can't even look at me. That's really what I thought."
Her memoir, Over the Influence, was released on September 17, 2024.
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