Metro

Joel girl in suicide try

The 23-year-old daughter of Billy Joel and supermodel Christie Brinkley tried to kill herself yesterday by swallowing sleeping pills — adding another chapter of sadness to a life she has sometimes described as lonely and overwhelming.

Medics were summoned to Alexa Ray Joel’s apartment on Bethune Street in the West Village at 12:21 p.m. after a female friend dialed 911 from a cellphone to report a possible overdose.

The friend told 911 operators Alexa had taken eight pills and wanted to die, but felt funny and then wanted to live, sources said. When rescuers arrived, they found she was having difficulty breathing, Fire Department officials said.

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Alexa was rushed to nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, where she was in stable condition, a family spokeswoman said. Her situation was not life-threatening and she was released last night, a source said.

A distraught Brinkley, rushing from her Long Island home, arrived at her daughter’s side at around 4 p.m.

Plainclothes detectives were spotted going into Alexa’s West Village apartment late yesterday afternoon.

The family has released no further details on the young woman’s medical condition or her mental state. But Alexa, who has been through a series of bad breakups with her on-again off-again former boyfriend and bandmate Jimmy Riot, recently blogged about being a lonely singleton in the city.

“I don’t like dating!!! Wish I could be in a relationship again without having to date,” she wrote in August. “I HATE going out!!”

Despite having been a prolific songwriter since her early teens, Alexa — who dropped out of NYU to start a music career — has also struggled to find mass appeal for her music and had yet to land a record deal with a major label.

She was scheduled to perform twice in Manhattan this coming Thursday: at J&R Music World and at the New York Stock Exchange tree lighting.

But this past March, she wrote about the difficulties if being an independent artist and being alone.

“I’ve really been having a hard time with everything lately, between moving into my new apartment & getting used to living alone . . . I was crying my eyes out tonight,” she wrote.

“And at the end of the day, I felt overwhelmed and terribly lonely.”

And there were family woes to contend with, too.

Her famous parents married in 1985 and went through an ugly divorce in 1994.

She has long struggled with her self-esteem, feeling as if she couldn’t measure up against to her supermodel mom and musical superstar dad, a source close to the family said.

“I’m never going to be a blonde model, when are you going to accept that,” she once lashed back at Brinkley, who often “badgered” Alexa about her weight, the source said.

She also had to live through the fallout of Brinkley’s ill-fated marriage to architect Peter Cook, which ended in 2008 after 12 years of marriage amid revelations of infidelity between Cook and an 18-year-old assistant.

Alexa struggled to come to terms with her painful breakup from Riot in January 2008.

“Jimmy and I have decided to part ways both personally and professionally, but it has absolutely nothing to do with his bass-playing . . . he’s an extremely talented guy and the consummate professional,” she wrote on her blog in January 2008.

The two briefly reconciled, but it didn’t last.

“I’m quite confused and devastated at the moment because Jimmy just broke up with me a few days ago, and for the second time this year. (Can you believe him??? Or maybe I should say: “Can you believe me”, since I guess I’m quite the poor sucker for love!!),” Alexa wrote in May 2008.

Her mood didn’t improve this year even as she continued to work on her music and release a new single, “Invisible.”

Her Web site said the song is about “disappointment over losing love and self-esteem” but finding personal empowerment.

Her apparent suicide attempt yesterday is eerily similar to her famously troubled dad’s own attempt to off himself when, in his early 20s, he was an unknown artist going through a bad breakup.

Billy Joel told Details magazine he tried to commit suicide by raiding his mother’s cleaning cupboard and swigging furniture polish. He chose the polish because he thought it would taste better than bleach, he said.

Additional reporting
by Erin Calabrese and Selim Algar

gotis@nypost.com