Alexa Ray Joel has had her share of pain, particularly after she and her first serious boyfriend broke up.
"I was crying every day for two years straight after that and, I was in denial, I was like, 'No, he didn't do that. This didn't happen,'" Joel, the only offspring from Billy Joel's marriage to Christie Brinkley, said in an interview airing Friday on 20/20. "It's, it's like a form of...you're not well."
But, despite that heartbreak, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter says she was definitely not trying to kill herself when she accidentally overdosed on homeopathic aspirin in December.
"It ended up making me feel kind of sick, and then I panicked and I was just not thinking clearly," Joel said. "It kind of bothers me, that the press calls this an overdose. And I take full responsibility for what I've done. But at the same time, I wasn't trying to kill myself. I have a flair for the dramatic, OK, I'm an artist. I'm a performer. Did I actually want to die? Absolutely not. I was not suicidal."
Joel did end up undergoing intensive therapy at the behest of her model mom and idol dad.
"I knew with my mom that she was feeling the pain I was going through," she said. "I mean she's just such a compassionate, empathetic woman...And my father, he has such perspective, he was like, 'You got to see outside of this. You're an intelligent, talented, beautiful woman.'"
Joel, who's now following in Brinkley's footsteps as a model for Prell shampoo, said that she has received tons of positive feedback from fans, both for her honesty about her battle with depression and for coming clean about her decision to get a nose job.
"I wasn't going to lie, it was clearly a different nose. I didn't want to play anybody for a fool. So I just said, 'Yeah, and I'm really happy with it.'"
Fittingly, the first single off of her upcoming album is called "Notice Me."
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