Christie Brinkley Reveals Painful Marriage to Billy Joel in New Memoir

When most people hear “Uptown Girl,” they picture a glowing, golden-haired Christie Brinkley bopping along to Billy Joel’s iconic love song, frozen in ‘80s adoration. But behind the perfect photos and pop culture fantasy was a woman in pain. Now, in her just-released memoir Uptown Girl, Brinkley peels back the glossy veneer.

Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel’s marriage breakdown 

“To be clear,” Brinkley writes in the book, “I never wanted to end things with Billy. But his drinking was bigger than the both of us.” This wasn’t a tabloid spectacle or some frivolous celebrity split—it was a woman holding on to love while it crumbled around her.

On Taste of Taylor, host Taylor Strecker and guest Emma Willmann dove into the details of Brinkley’s revelations. “The news has been wild,” Taylor says, “and Christie’s book is like a fever dream of red flags and beautiful people pretending everything’s fine.”

Brinkley paints a vivid, raw picture of their marriage’s chaos. In one scene, while Billy Joel was on tour in Honolulu, Brinkley confronted him about rumors of an affair with an unnamed Australian actress. 

And to say he didn’t take it well is an understatement: “Billy banged angrily on the front door for some time, then went around to the patio, which was on the ground floor, and banged on the glass doors for a while. When I didn’t answer, he did something unimaginable: He picked up a chaise lounge and threw it right through the doors of the patio, shattering the glass into a million pieces.”

Even then, Brinkley protected him. “Despite everything I felt in the moment—fear, betrayal, anger—I knew what to do,” she wrote. “I told the guards that the broken door had been an accident and that they didn’t need to report it. Even though I was emotional, I loved Billy and didn’t want the incident to become a news story.”

As Taylor says, “That’s not just love, that’s survival mode. She was literally managing a crisis while protecting the man causing it.”

A pattern of chaos and apologies

Joel insisted there was no affair, and Brinkley believed him. “But, then again, incident-and-repair had become our pattern, even if, slowly, things between us were becoming more difficult to mend,” she wrote, clearly reaching a place where the cycle of hurt and healing starts to feel like a vicious cycle on its own.

Taylor summarized on Taste of Taylor: “It’s like that moment you’re on the phone with your mom, eating your partner’s leftovers, not realizing you’re halfway through the pasta, and then boom—it hits you. Except instead of rigatoni, it’s a shattered marriage.”

Maintaining friendship after divorce

Despite their divorce (which Joel himself blames on his drinking problem), they remain on good terms and share a daughter, 39-year-old Alexa Ray Joel. “Our relationship is great,” she told The New York Post. “He lives mainly in Florida, so we don’t see him as much as when he lived in Sag Harbor, but when he comes by to see Alexa, he’ll come in and say hello.”

Taylor’s take? “That is some healed queen energy. You go from smashing patio doors to sipping espresso in Sag Harbor like nothing ever happened? It’s giving grace. It’s giving boundaries. It’s giving… ‘thank god we divorced before Instagram,’” she said.

Christie Brinkley’s ‘Uptown Girl’ is a memoir worth reading

Uptown Girl isn’t a tell-all in the typical sense. It’s not vengeful, nor is it designed to humiliate. It’s reflective, sad, and in many ways, deeply generous. Brinkley gives readers a window into what it looks like to love someone famous—and flawed—and to still come out the other side with your dignity intact.

“In the end,” Christie Brinkley wrote, “when the relationship isn’t functioning the way you want it to be anymore—that’s the worst kind of loneliness because you just can’t make it work together and that’s painful.”

Grab the book. And maybe grab a tissue, or seven, because this Uptown Girl’s story is one hell of a downtown ride.