She finished her wine, ordered another. She spoke in a laid-back, twangy way about Tony Romo, her parents, her career. When I asked about her ex-husband and reality-show co-star, Nick Lachey, she said, “I have not spoken to him in years.” When I asked if Tony Romo had watched Newlyweds, she said, “A couple episodes. He thought I was cute.”

I didn’t want to ask about her weight directly, so I hinted at it, asking instead about body image in general, physical changes, perception—from my questions, you might have thought I was interviewing the Wolf Man. “It comes with what I do,” she said, “and I know that every day the media’s going to challenge me, is going to want to bring me down. But I feel like I’m at such a place that I own myself, and it’s authentic. I own that authentic part of myself, and none of those words are harsh enough to make me believe them.”

She then said, “I can’t imagine saying some of the things people have said about me about anybody else.”

In the end, sitting with Jessica Simpson, you felt that here was a talented, decent, beautiful person who had reached a dead end in the trail she had been following since she was a girl in Texas, too young, really, to decide much of anything. To understand her current condition you must therefore understand the trail, the path she has followed—her story, her biography—for everything she has done and been led to this moment.

Simpson’s father (Joe) and mother (Tina) married young—20, 18. He was a Baptist minister, one of those regular Elmer Gantry types. Some of Jessica’s first memories are of sitting in the pews, listening to Joe Simpson preach. “He was amazing,” she told me. “If I’m going for advice for anything in my life, I go straight to my father because he has the answers.” Jessica was born in 1980 in Abilene, Texas. Her sister was born four years later. By the time Jessica was 10, the family had moved at least a half-dozen times, the minister forever in search of a ministry. It’s a righteous calling, but a hard life.

Jessica began singing on the altar, sunlight beaming through high windows, her first songs dedicated to the only Father that matters. Joe Simpson used to bring unwed mothers home to live, to counsel and feed, but also as a kind of visual warning to his daughters: Here is what comes from yielding to temptation! When Jessica was 12, Joe gave her a purity ring, on which she pledged to keep her virginity until its taking could be ordained by God (and aired on MTV).

How did Jessica decide that she wanted to be something more than a church singer, that she wanted to share her gift with the world?

By holy epiphany.

One weekend when she was 11 years old, on a church retreat, the pastor spoke of special callings, of being alert enough to hear, courageous enough to answer. After that, as the congregants were singing “Amazing Grace,” Jessica recognized the beauty of her own voice, as if for the first time, and the pastor seemed to hear it too, saying, There’s somebody in this room who’s going to use their voice to affect the world. Whoever you are, come to the front. After pushing through her fellow believers, Jessica stood beside the preacher, smiling because she knew.

Soon after, she went with her school dance class to open auditions being held in Dallas for the new Mickey Mouse Club, a nationwide, once-in-a-lifetime, get-famous-just-like-that search that began with 50,000 entrants. She sang “Amazing Grace” without accompaniment and danced to “Ice Ice Baby,” which should tell you something about the era and about Simpson. It was 1992. She made the cut, made the next cut and the cut after that, progressing as you progress from level to level in a video game, until she found herself in a studio in Orlando, Florida, with a dozen other finalists, what remained when the grade schools of America had been sifted and panned for gold. If you wanted to change the course of history, you could send Schwarzenegger back to 1992 to destroy that studio, as on its stages were the next 20 years of tabloid culture: Timberlake, Spears, Aguilera, and Simpson in shrunken, Muppet-baby form.