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Originally appeared on E! Online
The book is Brandy‘s, and it’s packed with reflections on her personal highs and lows.
“My life has not been perfect, but I’ve been able to navigate and heal and do the things that I’ve loved to do in my life,” the 47-year-old told Variety ahead of the release of her new memoir, Phases. “I went through a lot. But I’m still here and want to be an example of resilience and tell my stories.”
From her earliest days finding her range in church—much like her late idol Whitney Houston—to performing at the Grammys, the singer and actress born Brandy Norwood unpacks her inspiring career, including the inevitable frustrations and disappointments since she first broke out as a teen star on Moesha.
Along the way, she navigated a tricky dynamic with brother Ray J (“We’ve always been each other’s compass”) and felt the ultimate joy when she welcomed her now-23-year-old daughter Sy-Rai Smith. But she has also mourned the deaths of important figures in her life, such as Whitney and Aaliyah, and she was waylaid by haunting grief in the aftermath of a 2006 car crash that left another driver dead.
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“I no longer felt I had the right to continue living my life, or even to experience fleeting glimmers of joy,” Brandy wrote in Phases. “The woman who had died would never again feel sunshine on her face or hold her children close. Who was I to smile? To sing? To exist in a world where she no longer could?”
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She noted in the book that she considered “keeping all these stories locked inside,” admittedly afraid of what people might think, but she ended up detailing how she found her way out of that personal abyss following the accident and much more.
“For so long, I had been on a quest to find a new way forward, not just for my career, but for myself,” she wrote. “But I can’t move forward until I stop running from the past.”
Here are the biggest revelations from Brandy’s book Phases:
How Brandy Really Felt About Moesha Getting Canceled in 2001
Brandy had “mixed feelings” when her UPN sitcom Moesha was canceled in 2001 after six seasons.
She wrote in her memoir Phases that she was “gutted” to lose her on-set family, but at the same time, “I was free.”
Because, as the now-47-year-old also noted in the book, by season five, she “hated the character” she was playing, the “way she always had the right answer. The way she judged everyone around her.”
“I didn’t recognize myself in her anymore,” Brandy wrote. “Looking at her on the page was like staring into a funhouse mirror.”
Still, Moesha fans were “heartbroken,” she recalled. “They deserved a proper goodbye. Closure. We all did. But here’s the thing about unfinished stories— they live forever in possibility. I tried not to dwell on what could have been, or what we should have done differently, but of course I’ve imagined where Moesha might’ve gone next. By now, knowing her, she was probably running her own media empire.”
Brandy Sets the Record Straight About Feud With Monica
Despite the feud narrative that preceded their collaboration—”solidarity isn’t a story the industry wants to sell”—Brandy wrote that she “immediately thought of Monica” to join forces with on “The Boy Is Mine,” their smash-hit 1998 duet.
They had “an incredible time creating together,” she wrote. In turn, Brandy was “crushed” when Monica recut her vocal with producer Dallas Austin, but she also understood.
Then, “without warning,” Arista Records head Clive Davis announced Monica’s album would be called The Boy Is Mine, which to Brandy “felt like a calculated move to claim ownership of the song, the very thing the lyrics protested against.”
Their now-dueling album releases “poured kerosene on the flames of our supposed feud,” Brandy wrote. “I blamed Monica before I knew the full story. Neither of us truly wielded much power in those days.”
When they were invited to perform on The Tonight Show, Monica had a scheduling conflict and Brandy sang both parts. “The optics were problematic at best,” she admitted. By the time they performed at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, “The nonexistent rivalry had boiled over into genuine tension…driving a wedge between us that would take years to remove.”
Monica said on CBS Mornings when she and Brandy reunited for The Boy Is Mine Tour, “It started as nothing and it really did turn into something.” But, she noted, “I was 18, she was 17 when we did the record. People forget that you’re having this conversation about children, basically.”
Why Brandy Lied About Being Married to Her Daughter’s Father
When Brandy got pregnant with her and music producer Robert “Big Bert” Smith‘s daughter Sy’Rai Smith in 2001, Robert suggested that they tell people they were married, if asked.
“I understood it,” Brandy explained. “The ‘good girl’ narrative that had been stitched into my public persona demanded a specific sequence: marriage first, then motherhood.”When Brandy got pregnan
At the time, telling that “one little white lie…seemed so harmless.”
Later, “when the romantic love between us began to fade” after Sy’Rai was born in June 2002, Brandy “truly believed we could transition back into friendship without scars.”
Instead, Robert went on The Wendy Williams Show and said “we had fabricated our marriage to protect my pristine image.” Moreover, Brandy recalled, he said “I had been ‘the other woman.’ That he had reconnected with his girlfriend, who has now carrying his child. And most devastating of all, that the entire charade had been orchestrated by my mother.” (Robert now shares five children with wife Xochitl Jacques-Smith.)
The “betrayal cut deep,” she wrote, and the “professional consequences” from lying “were swift and merciless.”
Brandy thought she was protecting her child—and “she remains the greatest gift I have ever known”—but she “paid incalculable costs for that single decision. The judgment I felt from found me anyway, raising questions that haunt me still…How much of the backlash stemmed from my pregnancy outside marriage, and how much from the deception itself?”
Aaliyah’s Death in a Plane Crash “Cut to the Bone”
Brandy called Aaliyah “a genuine source of inspiration,” writing that her fellow artist, who was just one month older, “not only embraced me but actively championed my success.”
So when the “Try Again” singer was killed in a plane crash in August 2001, “Her death cut to the bone,” Brandy wrote. “She wasn’t just a peer and a friend—she was a kindred spirit. After navigating the same rocky waters of fame as teenagers, we had just really started coming into ourselves as women.”
Brandy Started to Believe She Was a “Reckless Monster” After Fatal 2006 Car Crash
In December 2006, Brandy was involved in a four-vehicle crash on a Los Angeles freeway in which a 38-year-old woman was killed.
A year later, the L.A. City Attorney’s Office opted to not charge Brandy with vehicular manslaughter, citing insufficient evidence to convict beyond a reasonable doubt.
Meanwhile, Brandy barely left her house for months, finding it “easier to hide than to face the world.”
When the deceased woman’s family filed a $50 million wrongful death lawsuit against her, Brandy wrote, “I understood their need for someone to blame…They needed resolution. Compensation. Some symbol of justice in a situation that offered none.”
Eventually, she continued, “Claims were settled. No charges were filed against me. But by then, the guilt had already calcified in my soul, hardening into something permanent and unmovable.”
The stage, usually her refuge, “became a torture chamber,” the applause feeling “brittle, insincere.” Sleep became “the only true escape.”
She wrote, “When your existence is defined by how the world sees you, your own thoughts—your very sense of self—become clouded by the opinions of strangers. And I began to believe I was the awful, reckless monster the internet, and thus the world, believed me to be.”
Brandy credited then-4-year-old Sy’Rai for giving her the will to keep going, explaining, “I would rise again. For her. Always for her.”
“The grief never left,” Brandy reflected. “But it softened. It made room. I stopped asking it to go away.”
Brandy Reveals Final Conversation With Whitney Houston
Brandy saw Whitney Houston the day before the singer died in February 2012, as the Cinderella costars were supposed to perform together at Clive Davis’ annual pre-Grammys party.
Whitney gave her a note at the time, the contents of which Brandy chooses to keep private, explaining, “I want to keep some small piece of our bond untouched by the world.”
But they also spoke that night on the phone “for three precious hours,” Brandy wrote, revealing that she “confessed the crushing pressure that was suffocating my career, the paralyzing fear that I would never recapture the magic of my earlier success, that I was becoming a relic.”
Whitney “scattered ‘baby’ and ‘sweetie’ throughout her sentences like musical notes” as she “returned every topic—no matter how dark—back to faith,” Brandy continued. And the 48-year-old “spoke of getting back in the studio, of the redemption waiting just around the corner with Sparkle, the long-delayed remake of the 1976 film she’d put on the backburner after we lost Aaliyah, who she’d handpicked for the lead role.”
The next night at Clive’s gala, which turned into a tribute for Whitney, Brandy wrote, “Monica and I clung to each other throughout that nightmarish evening, our shared grief forging a bond stronger than any hit record ever could. We made a tear-soaked promise to keep Whitney’s memory alive, to honor her legacy through our own voices, to never let the world forget what real talent coupled with real pain looked like.”
Brandy Felt Bad That Ray J Wasn’t as Successful as She Was
Brandy and Ray J have “always been each other’s compass,” she wrote, “pointing true north when the world spins chaotic. And we still are.”
And as far as she’s concerned, her 45-year-old brother—born William Ray Norwood Jr.—didn’t get the flowers he deserved.
“There’s a particular kind of heartache that comes from watching someone you love be overlooked,” Brandy wrote, referring to the lackluster sales of Ray J’s 1997 debut Everything You Want. “It cuts deeper than your own disappointments, burns hotter than your own failures.”
She continued, “I began to wonder if my success had inadvertently cast a shadow over him. If ‘Brandy’s brother’ had become both his introduction and his limitation.”
But, according to Brandy, this did not cause a rivalry between them.
“Ray and I never subscribed to that narrative,” she wrote. “We’d hear stories about famous siblings tearing each other apart over record releases or film opportunities, and we’d shake our heads in disbelief. That darkness never found purchase between us.”
“We are still each other’s best friend,” Brandy added. “We are still each other’s biggest fan. We are still Ray J and Brandy—R&B—finding our way through this complicated world, together.”
Ray J, who shared in January that he was recovering from near-fatal heart issues, said on a July 2025 episode of the Drop the Lo podcast that he loves his sister, but claimed he was “an embarrassment” to her and their parents due to his public persona.
But, he added, “I gotta do me, you know?”
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