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CELEBRITY NEWS

Aguilera finds more stuff to reveal

Christina's world

By Jill Smolowe
PEOPLE

Aguilera
In her new songs, "she's working on her past and her demons," a friend says of Christina Aguilera (at the "8 Mile" premiere in November 2002).

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(PEOPLE) -- Until recently, only Christina Aguilera's intimates knew the details of her hard-knock childhood as the daughter of a tough Army sergeant.

Whenever things got too ugly between her mom, Shelly, and her dad, Fausto, Aguilera had a ready recourse. "She'd run upstairs and put on 'The Sound of Music' -- that was her favorite video," says Marcie Reilly, a friend since seventh grade. "Somehow, singing would come out of it, and that's how she'd escape all the fighting and the horror."

On her latest CD, "Stripped" -- a follow-up to the '99 debut that earned her a Grammy Award and a Barbie-doll image -- Aguilera, 21, bares her past. Notoriously, in her new video and at awards shows and parties, she also bares almost everything else (though, remarkably, even then some of her 11 body piercings remain invisible).

In "I'm OK," she sings of the hurt she says she felt watching her mother "every time my father's fist would put her in her place." Another line speaks of "when I was thrown against those stairs," a lyric she told Rolling Stone was drawn from her father's behavior.

Though her parents separated when Aguilera was 6 and friends say she has virtually no contact with her father (who could not be reached for comment), the pain is apparently still vivid. "One time she called me up, and she was crying about how it's so hard to sing these lyrics, because it's her," says Reilly. Stephen Sollitto, 37, a close pal who often styles her hair, does her makeup and with whom she shares her five-bedroom Beverly Hills house, adds, "She said, 'Maybe this will help him to face what he's done and process it.'"

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As for the outfits, the public debate seems to be, Vamp or tramp? "She just gets more and more naked, and it gets sleazier," says former Spin editor Alan Light. Diane Martel, who directed Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" video, counters, "She's a young girl having fun." Trish Summerville, her stylist and close friend, suggests Aguilera is simply in the process of evolving: "She's working on her past and her demons and all of that because she feels safe right now."

Read more from this article on PEOPLE.COM: Relatively calm


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