JoJo Recalls Going to Taylor Swift’s House with Selena Gomez and Thinking Everyone ‘Felt Bad for Me’

• Joanna “JoJo” Levesque is opening up about her life and career in her debut memoir, Over the Influence
• The “Leave (Get Out)” musician writes about a years-long period in which she was unable to officially release music due to issues with her former record label
• In an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, Levesque writes about becoming friends with Selena Gomez during the time of uncertainty and attending a Galentine’s Day party at Taylor Swift’s house

During a period of career uncertainty, Joanna “JoJo” Levesque found support in a friendship with Selena Gomez.

Two decades after rising to fame as a tween with the hit 2004 song “Leave (Get Out),” Levesque is looking back on her life and career so far in her debut memoir, Over the Influence, out Sept. 17, including a years-long period where she was unable to officially release music.

“My whole twenties were just a s—show of confusion,” the 33-year-old performer tells PEOPLE, reflecting on a time where her former label, Blackground Records, did not have a steady distribution deal in place to properly put out music. The label, however, still had the rights to her recorded voice under a contract signed when she was 12 years old.

Fed up with career setbacks that were out of her control, Levesque released two free mixtapes — 2010’s Can’t Take That Away from Me and 2012’s Agapé — online to satiate fans’ hunger for new music, as well as her own desire to share art with the world.

At the same time, she remained at the mercy of the record label, obliging their requests to mold her into a marketable star in hopes of once again putting out music commercially and returning to the heights of her early fame.

“I was just like, ‘Am I this independent spirit who does what they want? Or am I a pawn of the major label systems who are telling me that I need to fit into this box, literally and figuratively?'” recalls Levesque, who writes about going to a weight loss doctor at the label’s suggestion and taking injections (long before the rise of Ozempic) to curb hunger.

“I never made a decision,” she adds. “I didn’t have the courage or stability in other areas of my life to feel confident enough to say, ‘F— y’all, this is just who I am. This is what I’m doing,’ in whatever area because I was very much still needing to have the validation and approval of the major label system, out of fear. I just didn’t know another way.”

PEOPLE can exclusively debut an excerpt from Over the Influence, in which Levesque opens up about finding support in Gomez, who brought her to a party at Taylor Swift’s house, where the “Too Little Too Late” singer ultimately left feeling as though she was running out of hope for her career.

Around the time I was introduced to yoga, a mutual friend, Francia Raisa, introduced me to Selena Gomez and we all started hanging.

Sel came to a few of my studio sessions, and I swung by hers to hang out or write together. It was honestly a breath of fresh air to be around someone who had started in this industry at such a young age, just like me, and was still so down to earth and open.

I can’t lie; I felt the occasional twinge of pain or jealousy at the outward differences in our lives and careers, but then I’d quickly reel myself back in: the level of fame she had was overwhelming to me. She couldn’t go anywhere without security flanking her and fans mobbing her at every corner. It just seemed like there was no sense of freedom for her to explore the world and be wherever and whoever she wanted to be. I imagined that must be suffocating.

It made me grateful for the relative anonymity I had whenever I walked down the street.

For Galentine’s Day, Selena invited me to Taylor Swift’s house so we could all celebrate. Taylor had this arts and crafts section set up where we took pictures of ourselves and slapped them on this cute questionnaire where we described our best qualities (and our worst ones), the things we were looking for in a guy, and the reasons why we were currently single. I snuck outside to the In-N-Out truck on her lawn to grab a burger, fries and Diet Coke, but also went out there to text the guy I’d been obsessing over at the time. This whole “girl’s night” scenario at Taylor’s, reclaiming the saddest day of the year for single folks was the best possible distraction from the complete unavailability of this f—boy.

This was such a big departure from the female popstar polarization of the 1990s and early 2000s. It was the 2010s now, and the “girl boss”/“girl gang” vibe was having a real moment. Earlier in my career, I’d been conditioned to keep girls like Selena and Taylor close but never let them really know what I was doing, going through or thinking. To be “strategic.” But I wasn’t. I sometimes wished I could be, but I simply liked who I liked and didn’t like who I didn’t like. While some of my peers could “play the game” like their lives depended on it, I never could quite figure out how to posture and politic and not feel like a big huge phony in the process. I genuinely enjoyed these girls, and although two of them were among the most famous women in the world, we had the shared experience of starting out very young, and I was happy to be let into the fold, part of a group. We stayed up late, wore sweats and no makeup, laughed until we cried, and ate copious amounts of french fries. It was awesome.

Taylor was so sweet and complimentary, and she seemed excited that Selena had brought me along with her. She mentioned deepcut songs of mine she loved and kept saying how f—ed up the lawsuit was, the fact that I couldn’t put out music. I don’t remember if she already knew what was going on from social media or if I’d told her about the situation, but she was — in no uncertain terms — letting me know she was on my side and believed in me.

I appreciated Taylor’s kind words, but I thought I could see in the eyes of everyone else at the party that they felt bad for me. Maybe they thought I was never going to get out of this limbo. Or that it was too late for me even if I did. Maybe they could tell I didn’t have the money or the parents who could help dig me out of any holes I might find myself in. Maybe they saw the imposter in my eyes. Then again, perhaps that was all my own projection.

Excerpted from Over The Influence: A Memoir by Joanna “JoJo” Levesque. Copyright © 2024. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Over the Influence: A Memoir by Joanna “JoJo” Levesque comes out Tuesday, Sept. 17 and is available now for preorders, wherever books are sold.