Miss USA 2019 Cheslie Kryst's New Memoir Reveals Private Agony Before Her Suicide at Age 30 (Exclusive Excerpt) (2024)

By the age of 30, Cheslie Kryst had earned a law degree and an MBA, won the Miss USA crown and was working a high-profile job as an Emmy-nominated correspondent for Extra. On camera and on social media, Kryst was radiant and bubbly. When she died by suicide on Jan. 30, 2022, three months before her 31st birthday, it was an inexplicable shock to those familiar with her public persona.

But those closest to her, like her mother April Simpkins , knew a different Kryst, one who suffered from depression and feared that she could never be good enough.

Just before she died, Kryst left her mother a note asking her to fulfill a final wish: help get the memoir she'd been writing published. In her book, Kryst revealed that she carried with her an "unshakable feeling that I did not belong" and battled a "constant inner voice repeating 'never enough'. " She wrote of the pressures that came with her success, saying 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."

Simpkins, 56, carried out her daughter's last request, and in hopes of reaching out to others wrestling with mental illness, she added her own voice to the end of the book, sharing the heartbreaking moment she learned that Kryst was gone and the lessons she's learned in grieving her daughter. "I knew it was important to share this," Simpkins, who has become a mental health advocate and an ambassador for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), tells PEOPLE. "I knew there are other people who felt what I was feeling and could relate."

Their book, By the Time You Read This: The Space Between Cheslie's Smile and Mental Illness, is out April 23. Proceeds from the book will go toward theCheslie C. Kryst Foundation, which supports mental health programs for youth and young adults.

In these excerpts, shared exclusively with PEOPLE, Kryst and Simpkins reveal the private pain that Cheslie faced.

In May 2019 Kryst was named Miss USA at the age of 28, then the oldest Miss USA ever crowned. Immediately after her triumph, she faced backlash online.

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. More than one person messaged me telling me to kill myself.

All of this only added to my long-standing insecurities — the 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. People would soon find out I was a fraud. I felt like an imposter, but not just in pageants.

Over the next few weeks, the media coverage continued. I almost always suppressed my panicky thoughts and feelings of inadequacy during my interviews. I only felt like a failure afterward, as I meticulously picked apart each of my responses and kicked myself for not using a better word or saying a profound phrase or interjecting humor or throwing out a useful stat.

Winning Miss USA hadn’t made my imposter syndrome go away. Instead, I was waiting for people to realize I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing. 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.

The morning of Jan. 30, 2022, April Simpkins writes, she received a devastating text from Kryst. It began:

“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 . . .”

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.

Inhale. Exhale.
Inhale. Exhale.
If I stopped telling my body how to breathe, I would die.

At Cheslie’s funeral, I kept thinking, “I have to survive this because my family shouldn’t have to bury me this soon after losing Cheslie.” That was the one thin thread that held me together that day . . . If I died, who would tell the world all the incredible things I knew about my baby girl?

[My] daughter was a fighter and yet she was gone. Every day she’d fought persistent depression, until she couldn’t fight anymore. 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. Everyday I’d had with her was a true gift from God. Every day she was here was a victory.

Cheslie didn’t “do this to me” or anyone else. She felt unimaginable pain and needed that pain to stop . . . It was clear to me that her passing was not an emotion-fueled, spontaneous decision. She’d sent me that final text message to comfort me and to explain the depth of the pain she had carried.

From By the Time You Read This: The Space Between Cheslie’s Smile and Mental Illness. Her Story in Her Own Words by Cheslie Kryst and April Simpkins. Copyright 2024 by April Simpkins. Reprinted by permission of Forefront Books.

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or visit crisis textline.org to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

More on Cheslie Kryst and April Simpkins's story is in the new issue of PEOPLE, on sale Friday.