Eve Reflects on Dancing at Strip Club at 17, Says She Quit Because 'I Was Lazy!' (Exclusive)

The rapper opens up about her brief stint dancing at a strip club prior prior to hitting hip-hop stardom in her new memoir 'Who's That Girl?'

Before she was a Grammy award-winning artist, Eve had a brief stint working at a strip club.

In her new memoir Who's That Girl?, excerpted exclusively in this week's PEOPLE, the rapper, 45, recounts how she took a second job dancing at a strip club in the Bronx when she was a teen, in addition to working a retail job, when her rap dreams didn't happen as quickly as she'd hoped.

“In my head, I was thinking, ‘I need to be grown now, and it’s the quickest way I can get out of the house,’” Eve tells PEOPLE. “But I was so bad at it. I was lazy.”

She quit dancing after two months, following a chance meeting with the rapper MA$E at the club. He urged her to focus on rapping instead.

“When MA$E became a pastor, I was like, ‘Yeah, that makes sense,’” she says. “He was my prophet that day. I needed that extra push.”

Related: Eve Says 2007 DUI Arrest Was a 'Sign' She Needed Help: 'It Saved My Life' (Exclusive)

Born Eve Jeffers to Julie, a publishing company supervisor, and Jerry, a chemical plant supervisor, in Philadelphia, Eve started battling male high school classmates in rap cyphers at 14 and knew she wanted to pursue music.

After she quit dancing, she was signed — and then dropped — from Dr. Dre’s label Aftermath in a span of eight months.

"I think it was a huge blessing in disguise," she says. "I needed to be humbled. I think a lot of the reason why I got dropped by Dre is that I was so, 'When is it my turn? When are you going to put me on?' So extra Philly feisty. I needed to be sent back home to be like, 'OK, well, if you got this opportunity again, who do you want to be? What do you want to show the world?'"

She later found her home with the Yonkers, N.Y.-based rap crew the Ruff Ryders. During her audition, she had to battle every man in the room.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is a ride or die situation. I’m rapping for my life right now,’” she says. “I had to kill them all, lyrically.”

Related: Eve Reveals She Had Ectopic Pregnancy While Filming Sitcom in 2006 and Said It Was Appendicitis: 'In Denial' (Exclusive)

The Ruff Ryders were impressed, and she released her debut album Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders' First Lady, which included hits like “Gotta Man” and “Love Is Blind," with them in 1999. On the day of the album release, she got a call from JAY-Z. He congratulated her but also warned her not to be too upset because female hip-hop albums don’t sell well.

“I wasn’t mad at him,” Eve says. “If anything, it was just fuel.”

The album ended up going No. 1 on the Billboard 200, making Eve the third female rapper in history to achieve the feat. But it was lonely at the top.

“I thought it was a sisterhood, and as soon as you get signed, everybody's like, ‘Hey, Barbie!’” she says. “It was not like that. I remember feeling like, ‘Damn, this is freaking lonely, man.’”

Still, Eve pushed forward, and in 2001 she released her massive hit "Who's That Girl" and her Grammy-winning Gwen Stefani collab "Let Me Blow Ya Mind." She also made her first foray into acting in the 2002 film Barbershop.

Related: Eve Shares Family Photos of Baby Son Wilde and Her Stepchildren Enjoying Vacation in Ibiza

Since her last role in the TV series Queens wrapped in 2022, Eve has been enjoying domestic bliss in London with her husband, British businessman Maximillion Cooper, 52, his four kids from a previous marriage and their son Wilde, 2.

“I like that I'm able to dip in and dip out [of the industry],” she says. “Because I have struggled with anxiety and stress, at this point in my life, I am very careful about not bringing that into the house with the baby. I'm an older mom, so my reserves of energy aren't the same, and I want to make sure that I'm fully gassed up for Wilde.”

And while Eve's fans have dubbed her current chapter a "soft life" — a trend that bucks hustle culture — she's found peace.

"There's something to be said about the 'soft life,'" she says. "It's what you make of it."

Who's That Girl? is out Sept. 17. It's available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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Read the original article on People.