Tarek El Moussa Reveals Why He Detailed His Struggles in His New Memoir: ‘I Feel Like I Had to Be Honest’
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"In a lot of ways, [the memoir] was an apology to my family, to my ex-wife, to my children, to my mom, to my dad, to everybody,” he shared
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Tarek El Moussa is getting candid about why he’s sharing some of his darker aspects of his life in his new book.
The Flip or Flop star, 42, was asked on The Jennifer Hudson Show about why he opened up in his book Flip Your Life: How to Find Opportunity in Distress―in Real Estate, Business, and Life about his struggles following his divorce from his ex-wife Christina Hall.
“I felt like I had to be honest, you know?,” El Moussa told host Jennifer Hudson. “And the only way to tell the real story is to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Right?”
“And it was just my time to share what I went through,” he continued. “And in a lot of ways, it was an apology to my family, to my ex-wife, to my children, to my mom, to my dad, to everybody.”
In his new book, El Moussa details the struggles and triumphs that led him to become who he is today, including finding out he had been diagnosed with cancer and reliving the end of his marriage in 2016, in which he fled to a nature area with a pistol after a "blowup" fight with Hall.
He shared in his book that he lived in what he described as “a halfway house” for two months after his and Hall’s split and hit a low point in his life after their separation, during which he barely ate, felt depressed and drank heavily, especially after he stopped taking testosterone.
“When you're going through, you know, multiple cancers back-to-back and your hormones are off and you’re in surgeries and you have no thyroid, you do things you normally wouldn’t do. Not that it’s an excuse. But I wasn’t the best guy during those years,” El Moussa said, alluding to those incidents described in the book.
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“You’ve been through a lot,” Hudson noted, to which the HGTV star admitted, “Yeah, it was tough. It was real tough.”
“But what really broke me, honestly, was my divorce,” he added. “That was exponentially more difficult than every issue in my entire life put together. And somehow I got through it.”
He said that since then, his life has taken a more positive turn, and that his relationship with his ex-wife is now “better than it’s ever been.” He added that Hall communicates well with his current wife Heather Rae El Moussa, especially when it comes to taking care of his and Hall’s children Taylor, 13, and Brayden, 8.
El Moussa told Hudson that he thinks it’s “very important” for his kids to eventually read his memoir, “because they know me as the dad they know today — happy, positive, loving, fun, caring, giving — and I think it's important for them to understand, no, I wasn't always like that.”
"And in their lives, they're going to go through hard times and it's not always going to be rainbows and butterflies," he added. "When hard times come, you have to be prepared, you got to be ready to fight and you got to keep going."
Read Tarek El Moussa's full story in Flip Your Life: How to Find Opportunity in Distress—in Real Estate, Business, and Life, out now.
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