Simpson’s dad and manager, Joe Simpson, tried to talk her out of walking down the aisle minutes before the couple’s wedding — and maybe she should have listened. Because almost immediately after getting hitched, things fell apart — partially because her dad sold a show to MTV around their married life that they hoped would be as successful as The Osbournes, which premiered a year before. So not only was their marital home filled to the max with cameras — living not a lot of intimate moments — but she was also young, her star was on the rise and she was working a non-stop work schedule to help pay their bills.

Here’s what Simpson said about her real married life with Lachey in the book:

Simpson scoffed at a prenup — not her dad.

When the pair married, Lachey was a bigger star as part of 98 Degrees and approached her about signing a prenup. While there was a rumor that her dad refused to let her sign, Simpson said she was the one who said no. “What are you talking about?” she recalled saying during the explosive exchange. “For when you want to get a divorce?” He insisted that he didn’t have plans to divorce and told her his “advisers [said] it’s for the best.” She told him “to marry them” and stormed off. He didn’t bring it up again.

Cameras ruined their newlywed bliss.

Simpson’s dad thought appearing on the show would get MTV to play her music, beyond TRL, so she and Lachey inked a deal. The premise was to be “two celebrities who viewers were used to seeing airbrushed to perfection, eating cereal and passing gas.” While their married life consisted of them sitting on the couch (with her making her infamous Chicken of the Sea observations), it morphed into more of an acting gig, where producers planned things for them to do — like camping. They quickly felt under surveillance from dawn to dusk to the point where they had “burn marks on our backs from the mics being strapped to us for so long” each day. They started playing roles and would have little spats, which resulted in her going to the couch to “sad-watch TV while Nick finished his beer outside.”

She worked non-stop to pay off the wedding, their mansion mortgage.

The truth about their early days as newlyweds is that they were often apart. Their wedding set them back financially and their music careers were pretty slow. Much of their time was was spent “trying to figure out how we were going to pay the mortgage on our $1 million house in Calabasas,” Calif., she recalled. She said she’d take any gig — and they started rolling in. “I was very aware that I was a midlevel celebrity still paying off my wedding and not in a position to say no to gigs,” she wrote. As the show grew in popularity, the gigs became more lucrative. “We could pick up $100,000 to sing three songs at a bar mitzvah or crazy money to surprise employees at a Chicken of the Sea staff meeting in San Diego,” she recalled. But being away all the time meant she never really settled into married life. She recalled coming home from one trip and Lachey had decorated the house without her. She was upset he did it — mostly because she wanted to use decorators, but he was trying to save a buck. She said Lachey would complain about the bread being “moldy,” but it was tough to be a housewife when she was on the road for weeks at a time.