Pink talks about the superficial industry of Hollywood and how she got her husband back

Pink may be a Cover Girl now, but this edgy pop star wasn’t always cover-ready. Well, at least that’s what her critics told her — but don’t worry, she didn’t believe them and now, more than ever, she’s happy, beautiful, and on the cover of yet another magazine and talking all about her past struggles and how she found joy.

“A ‘girl like me’ is someone who doesn’t rest on her looks, who has had people tell me from day one, ‘You’re never going to get magazine covers because you are not pretty enough,'” Pink explains in the newest issue of Redbook Magazine. “I’m totally comfortable with that. I know my strong points: I work hard, I have talent, I’m funny and I’m a good person.”

“Beautiful has never been my goal,” she says. “Joy is my goal – to feel healthy and strong and powerful and useful and engaged and intelligent and in love. It’s about joy. And there’s such joy now.”

Among Pink’s joy are husband Carey Hart and their daughter Willow who on June 2, 2011 completed her family. “It was like my whole life made sense, for the first time, ever,” Pink reveals of the moment she gave birth.

Pink and Carey’s relationship began 2001 when they met at the X Games in Philadelphia. After a brief split in 2003, the two got back together and in June of 2005, Pink proposed to Carey during a Motocross race in which she held up a sign that read, “Will you marry me?” On January 7, 2006, the couple tied the knot in Costa Rica, but by February of 2008, the couple announced that they had separated and Carey went on to star in Pink’s video for “So What.” Two years later, the couple had reunited and in November of 2010, they announced that they were expecting a baby.

Also in the magazine, Pink opens up about how she and Carey ended up back together after their relationship had gone south. “Eleven months after we broke up, he asked me to fly to Las Vegas to perform on New Year’s Eve at his club,” she told the magazine. “I wanted to see him. And I looked hot. There’s something about breaking up with someone — you just look hotter than you ever did before. I will never look as good as I did those six months after we broke up. Never!”

“After sound check I told him that he needed to come to my room,” she continued. “I had made him a photo album of all the cards he had ever given me, of all the photos of our entire relationship. I spent months on this album. On the last page, I pasted a photo of me from a really bad movie I made years ago with my neck slit and blood everywhere. Next to it I wrote, ‘This is me without you.’ On the next page, there was a picture of a baby. And I wrote: ‘The rest is unwritten.’ The divorce papers that we never signed were behind that page. I was like, ‘The rest is up to you.'”

For more on Pink’s interview, pick up the latest issue of Redbook Magazine.