Miss USA 2019 Cheslie Kryst’s Posthumous Memoir Details Mental Health Struggles Ahead of Suicide

Now, her story will be told in her own words with the posthumous release of her memoir, By the Time You Read This: The Space Between Cheslie’s Smile and Mental Illness. The book, released today, was a collaboration between Cheslie and her mother April Simpkins.

According to Simpkins, she received a note from her daughter shortly before her death that Simpkins fulfill this final wish: ensure the memoir is published. In January 2022, the beauty queen’s death by suicide shocked the world. Since her passing, Simpkins has spoken about her daughter’s internal struggles.

“Cheslie led both a public and a private life,” she told E! News in 2022. “In her private life, she was dealing with high-functioning depression which she hid from everyone — including me, her closest confidant — until very shortly before her death.”

“I have never known a pain as deep as this,” Simpkins added. “I am forever changed.”

In honoring her daughter’s request, Simpkins added words of her own at the end, sharing the moment she learned that her daughter was gone, and what she’s learned from grieving her daughter.

She also revealed the text she got from her daughter just hours before Kryst committed suicide, detailed in an excerpt share with People. “First, I’m sorry. By the time you get this, I won’t be alive anymore, and it makes me even more sad to write this because I know it will hurt you the most,” Kryst wrote her mother.

Simpkins shared her immediate reaction, writing, “My brain couldn’t register the words on the screen. I read them again and screamed from a place in my soul that I didn’t know existed.”

She said that she felt a burden of responsibility to tell Kryst’s story, and that this — plus worry about the family dealing with too much at once — is “the one thin thread” that held her together through her daughter’s funeral.

On the public face, Kryst was this confident, incredibly put-together young woman. Not only was she a pageant winner, she had earned both a law degree and an MBA. She had even scored an Emmy-nomination for her work as a correspondent for Extra.

Internally, she was battling an incredible sense of pressure. Kryst wrote that she felt, “I had to be perfect because I had to represent for all youth, women, and Black people who also wanted to be in the room but had been denied access.”

At the same time that she felt this huge responsibility to carry this torch to open doors for others, Kryst said she was fighting against imposter syndrome, an “unshakeable feeling that I did not belong,” as well as an unshakable feeling she was “never enough.”

Talking about the groundbreaking moment she became the oldest-ever Miss USA winner at 2018, Kryst broke down how hurtful online comments impacted her almost immediately.

“Just hours after my win, I had to delete vomit-face emojis that a few accounts had plastered all over the comments on my Instagram page,” she wrote. “More than one person messaged me telling me to kill myself.”

Kryst shared that all of this fed into her “long-standing insecurities,” leaving her “feeling that everyone around me knew more than I did, that everyone else was better at my job, and that I didn’t deserve this title.”

Sharing that she felt like a “fraud,” Kryst said that internal perception wasn’t just limited to her pageant title. She wrote, “I’d perfected how to deal with that feeling in competition or in small doses — I could compartmentalize anything in short bursts. I’d immediately focus my thoughts on positive statements of power, but that only lasted for so long.”

Kryst detailed tearing herself apart after each interview following her win, kicking herself for not responding with “a profound phrase or interjecting humor or throwing out a useful stat.”

Simpkins chose to honor her daughter’s final request as a way to “tell the world all the incredible things I knew about my baby girl,” and also shed light on both of their struggles, telling People, “I knew it was important to share this. I knew there are other people who felt what I was feeling and could relate.”

In sharing Kryst’s story, Simpkins wrote that her “daughter was a fighter and yet she was gone. Every day she’d fought persistent depression, until she couldn’t fight anymore.”

She also came to realize that Kryst’s final text message to her mother was “to comfort me and to explain the depth of the pain she had carried.”

Pushing back against any notions that this was some spontanous, emotional decision, Simpkins wrote, “Cheslie didn’t ‘do this to me’ or anyone else. She felt unimaginable pain and needed that pain to stop.”

“Despite the many ways depression tried to rob her of joy, with near-constant headaches, loneliness, hopelessness, sadness, and a feeling of unworthiness, she still found a way to smile, love, and give,” Simpkins wrote.

“Everyday I’d had with her was a true gift from God,” she continued. “Every day she was here was a victory.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or has had thoughts of harming themselves or taking their own life, get help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) provides 24/7, free, confidential support for people in distress.