My mother was born on April 24. And every year on that day, I stay home and think about her. It was always strange to me that since her death, her side of the family had shunned my brother and me. They didn’t go to her funeral; they didn’t help my father pay her hospital bills; they didn’t even offer to babysit us while he worked. I was able to forgive them for this, but my brother and father never could. Maybe it was because I was so young that it didn’t affect me as much.

Whenever I asked about my mother’s parents, my father and brother told me they were bad people and I shouldn’t talk to them. So eventually I put up a wall and pretended like they weren’t part of my life.

But once again, on what would have been my mom’s fifty-sixth birthday, my thoughts turned to them. My father had called me just a few weeks prior. It was the first time I had spoken to him since I’d saved him from the bounty hunters. He phoned to tell me that his mother, who had nursed me to health with gobs of butter when I was withdrawing from meth, had died. After a long battle with cancer, the disease had spread to her lymph nodes and then throughout her body. She had been the closest thing I’d had to a mother, even if she did sometimes steal Tony’s coke. And to also lose her to cancer was devastating.

My father was still playing boy toy in New Jersey. My brother had stayed in Florida with his wife and his son, Gage. Tony was going through a hard time. He had become a successful dry-waller, but his back started acting up and he was no longer able to work and support his family. So he decided to make a living as a tattoo artist, even though he’d never held a tattoo gun before in his life.

With my brother and father so far away and wrapped up in their own problems, my thoughts turned to my mom’s relatives, especially her mother, who I remembered loving so much when I was a kid. I told Nikki all about it.

“Just call your grandmother already,” she said.

“I don’t know if I can. It’s been awhile, and I feel bad.”

“You can’t be a coward about this,” she said. “You have to do it, or you’ll feel guilty your whole life.”

My grandparents had always lived in the same little house in Las Vegas with the same telephone number. I picked up the phone and dialed the number.

“Hello,” came a man’s voice on the other end. It was my uncle, Dennis.

“Hi, Dennis, it’s Jenna. Is Gramma there?”

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello? Dennis?”

I listened closer, and he was crying. “Jenna,” he finally said. “Gramma is dead. She died two weeks ago.”

“Oh no. What happened?”

“She had ovarian cancer.”

When he said the word cancer, it touched a self-destruct button in me and I just started bawling. I blubbered, “Thanks, bye,” and quickly hung up. I couldn’t even talk to him. And I haven’t talked to him since.

Months later, I tried to call and the phone was disconnected. There was no forwarding number.

I have few regrets, but one of them is not being there for my grandmother when she was sick and dying, because her pain must have been as severe as my mom’s. To this day, I still beat myself up for not calling even once in all those intervening years to say I loved her and forgave her. She probably died thinking that I hated her and abandoned her.

After that call, I had a panic attack. I was sure that I was going to die of cancer at an early age, just like my mom. And that meant I had just a few years left to make a family of my own. I couldn’t keep escaping from the responsibility and commitment of adulthood by finding excuses to stay on the road, otherwise I’d end up no better than my father. Besides, Nikki and I were beginning to get on each other’s nerves. I was ready to haul off and punch her if she fell on me one more time onstage. It aggravated me, and it hurt —she was practically twice my size.

So I relented and started talking to Jay more often. I had been avoiding him, because I felt that he was someone I could fall in love with. But he was there for me when I needed him, like when the bounty hunters were after my dad. We started having friendly conversations more often, and I felt a yearning to see him again. I wanted to have fun with him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted the friendship. I wanted the sex. I needed to stop hiding and settle down.

Tommy was still on the road with Mötley Crüe, and I happened to be finishing up my tour in Vancouver when he was playing there. I went to his concert, and he sat me just out of sight behind the drum set. In the middle of “Home Sweet Home,” he turned around and pointed his drumstick at me. I felt nothing. And that was when I realized that I didn’t love him.

He was just a fun distraction. I liked living on the edge with him, but he was in love with Pamela Anderson and always would be, no matter how much he said he hated her for putting him in jail and trying to take away the kids he loved. (Strangely, when I met Pamela a year later at the MTV Video Music Awards, she ran up to me like an old friend; when I told her that it was nice to finally meet her, she said, “Oh, we haven’t met before?”)

Later that night, Tommy came to see me dance. While I was doing my Polaroids, he kept kissing me and hanging all over me. I don’t like guys doing that out of the club, and I certainly don’t enjoy it while I’m working. It makes me uncomfortable. To top it off, Tommy had told Howard Stern on the air that I was his new girlfriend. It was touching that, unlike most other celebrities I’d met, he wasn’t just after a clandestine one night stand that he’d deny later. But I was still incensed (as was a certain listener in Phoenix).

It felt weird to have Tommy clinging to me all the time. I had been such a big fan of his as a teenager, but his neediness took all the mystique away. When all the people you used to idolize are hitting on you, having a crush on anyone becomes impossible —because no one is out of your league.

I had always found it very cool, for example, that Sylvester Stallone had never hit on me at Planet Hollywood in Bangkok. But then I saw him again when I was eating with Joy at a club called Barfly in Los Angeles. He sent a bottle of wine to our table and invited us to join him. But when we did, he was so forward that it made me uncomfortable. He couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from my breasts. The next day, Joy and I ran into him with his wife or girlfriend at a Cirque du Soleil opening in Santa Monica and he shot us a look begging us to walk past like we didn’t know him.

After that, I realized that I was turning into a person I didn’t want to be. I was acting just like my dad did when he drifted from partner to partner after my mom died, looking for some way to lighten the responsibility of life without investing any extra emotion into someone else. I didn’t want to be another girl on Tommy’s list, or the next in a long line of blond bimbos for some other star. I wanted to achieve the one thing I had always really desired, which was to have a family.

Ever since I was a teenager writing in my diary, I’d wanted to be a wife and a mother. It was never something I could explain intellectually; it was simply a gut feeling, like the urge to get pregnant when I lost my virginity. Perhaps I just wanted to know what unconditional love felt like, to look into the eyes of my own baby and make his or her life wonderful in all the ways mine never was.

When Nikki and I finally wrapped up our tour, we were just barely on speaking terms with each other. At our last show, our nerves were so frayed from exhaustion, alcohol, and drugs that we were at each other’s throats. She accused me of stealing money from her at one point, and it took every ounce of self-control I had to keep from bloodying her face with my heel again. So when we returned home, I slept for the first time in the loft instead of in bed with her.

As I lay there alone that night, I realized that I had become a complete addict. I’d take so much Vicodin some nights that the next day I couldn’t even remember where I’d been or how I’d gotten home. My stomach ached constantly, I had dramatic mood swings, and the drug no longer gave me any sort of euphoria. I was just an aching bundle of exposed nerves.

I recognized the path I was heading down, because I had been there before. The drug just wasn’t worth all the trouble it was causing. I needed to get it —and this whole partying-to-make-up-for-my-missed-adolescence thing— out of my system. So I just said, “No more.” Then I popped three pills and went out and partied. The next afternoon, I said “No more” again, as I did on the following afternoon and the afternoon after that. Finally I just grabbed my huge tub of white Vicodin footballs and dumped them down the toilet with the same conclusive certainty I had dumped most of the men in my life since Jack.

For days afterward, I had the shakes and every single part of my body ached. It felt like someone had beaten me about the back, knees, and head with a truncheon. Though withdrawal can last for months, I was done in a week. And I was done with my crash diet too. Vicodin is supposed to slow down the body’s metabolism, but it seemed to have had the opposite effect on me. I was so bony I made Kate Moss look like Carnie Wilson presurgery. My lettuce-and-Power-Bar-diet was officially over.

When my head cleared, I looked at Nikki and realized that she was beyond gone. She was bloated from drinking and partying, and wasn’t going to come out the other side anytime soon. This was largely because she had started seeing another loser guy. He had moved into the apartment, and I was tired of it. She just couldn’t stop the cycle, and I wasn’t going to let her suck me in again.