64 | ROLLING STONE | J U LY 2 0 1 9
resent a power struggle; I wasn’t like, ‘Yeah, I’m going
to go do some fucking dyke shit on TV!’ ”), was she
truly bisexual if she was only publicly dating men?
Now, in her sunny and spotless kitchen, with an art-
fully arranged cheese plate resting on the counter and
the pasta water coming to a boil, Halsey looks at me,
smiles and adds some more spice to the pot.
ack in high school, back when she
was still Ashley Nicolette Frangipane,
back before she took her stage name
from a subway stop in Brooklyn near
where a heroin-addicted boyfriend
once lived, Halsey was a misfit, hiding
out in the art room where the bullies were unlikely to
venture. Never mind the AP classes, the gymnastics rou-
tines, the school yearbook she edited; these wholesome
activities were undercut by others more suspicious to the
teenage mind: cutting off all her hair, playing music in
the coffee shop of the neighboring town, going to shows
in the city, and speaking her mind. When she was 15, she
talked her mom into letting her get her first tattoo; in
fact, they went to get matching ones together.
The animus of her high school peers drove her online,
where Tumblr became a dumping ground for artwork
and poetry and songs she’d written satirizing such
things as Taylor Swift’s relationship
with Harry Styles. There, she could
see what people responded to, and
she could see that they responded, for
some reason, to various versions of
her. She dropped out of community
college, which she found to be a waste
of time, and doubled down, creating
a platform before most people
understood what that was. “My mom
was like, ‘Your real life sucks. You
have no friends. You decided not to
go to college. You live in this fantasy
world on the internet,’ ” she says. “And
I was trying to explain to her, like, ‘I’m
building a brand.’ And she was like,
‘You’re building a fucking what?’ ”
Leaving home to couch-surf in
Brooklyn and the Lower East Side
gave her a chance to give that brand
a test drive. “Nobody knew me, so
I could be anyone I wanted to be,”
she says. And what she wanted to
be was “just an amalgamation of
other people I liked. A little Jagger, a little Alex Turner,
a little Patti Smith, a little fucking Effy from Skins, a
little Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind, and a little Winona Ryder, Girl, Interrupted. It
was everything that spoke to my fabricated angst, you
know?”
Technically homeless, she romanticized her bohemian
life online and kept the ways in which she struggled —
the minimum-wage jobs, the indignities of having only
$9 to your name — to herself. Recently, when she talked
about sleeping with men merely for a place to stay, “it of
course turns into this hyperbolized fantasy of ‘Halsey the
Hooker,’ ” she scoffs. “I didn’t have a pimp, no one was
handing me money. But I was definitely dating dudes
I wasn’t into because I could crash at their apartment.
I was having sex as a means of survival. I’m lucky that
that’s all it was for me; for other women I knew, it wasn’t
just that. That’s the point I was trying to make.”
Whatever she was doing to get by, it turned out that
what she was expert at was creating a story and then
manifesting it in real life, so much so that when she
turned up for a meeting at Astralwerks with all her
possessions in a bag at her feet, she seemed so fully
formed as an artist that Glenn Mendlinger, the guy
who signed her, couldn’t help but think, “ ‘Are we being
punked?’ She was talking about the arc of campaigns
and mood boards and textures, and she had 25,000
followers on Twitter.”
It’s a power she still wields, turning stories into
realities in her day-to-day life, setting the scene and
casting herself into whatever role she fancies. Last night,
for instance, the scene was “Indie Film” and Halsey
was the artsy heroine, with a supporting lead in the
form of her boyfriend, Dominic Harrison, otherwise
known as the British alt-rocker Yungblud. “We were
just sitting around in our underwear working on poetry
on our typewriters like fucking losers in an indie movie,”
she says. “I ordered Chinese food,
listened to almost the entire Beatles
anthology, went to sleep around two
or three.”
It is a fact of her life, and a
condition of her bipolar disorder,
that Halsey does not always quite
know what version of herself she’ll
be when she wakes up. Diagnosed
at age 17 after a suicide attempt, she
says that she has for some time now
been in an extended manic period
that she knows won’t last forever. “I
know I’m just going to get fucking
depressed and be boring again
soon,” she tells me, frowning. “And
I hate that that’s a way of thinking.
Every time I wake up and realize
I’m back in a depressive episode, I’m
bummed. I’m like, ‘Fuck. Fuck! This
is where we’re going now? OK... .’ ”
The mania, she thinks, may suit
her, even if it can make her more
volatile, more prone to doing “crazy
shit.” She’d been manic the first time we met too, when I
wrote about her in 2016. That day, the plan had been to
meet in New York’s Central Park for a “picnic,” though
Halsey and I had gone straight for the Veuve Clicquot
rosé. We were both in a precarious place, and we could
somehow sense that in the other. Before long, we were
talking about the miscarriages we’d recently had and
weeping together in the midday sun. Later, the same
Halsey who has been unremittingly open about her
bipolar disorder, her bisexuality, her relationships and
her suicide at tempt would tell other journalists that hermiscarriage is the one detail she regrets sharing. And I
was the one who shared it.
Now, Halsey thinks back to how it all went down,
the torrent of misogyny I’d brought upon her by writing
about that intimate experience, one inevitably cast by the
Halsey haters of the world as manipulative, attention-
seeking, maybe even a lie: “It was just really weird, to
see how people were like, ‘Well, I’m going to police the
validity of this experience that she had.’ You know?”
I start to apologize, but she gently stops me. “I
appreciate you saying that,” she says, “but defi nitely it
had nothing to do with you and everything to do with
the way people perceive the female experience.” By this
point we’ve both gorged on her spicy rigatoni ( perfectly
spicy, worth the hype) under a huge, framed picture of
Kurt Cobain at Reading and Leeds and have moved to
the living room, where there’s a type writer on the coffee
table, a large crate for Halsey’s dog, Jagger, and a half-
finished painting leaning against a column in the middle
of the room next to a Polaroid camera and a palette of
paint. (“I’m doing this series of paintings where water-
melon is representative of this taboo female sexual-
ity,” she tells me. “I know it sounds really weird, but I
promise it makes sense.”)
In fact, the female experience is something Halsey’s
been thinking about a lot, giving speeches at the
Women’s March and other venues in which she’s
referenced being sexually abused by a family friend
when she was a child, forced into sex by a boyfriend
when she was a teenager and sexually assaulted just
a couple of years ago, something from which she’d
assumed her fame made her immune. “Here’s what’s
fucked up to me,” she says pointedly. “A young man seeks
success and power so that he can use it to control people,
and a young woman seeks success and power so that she
no longer has to worry about being controlled.” But it
turned out that even that problematic setup had been
grossly optimistic, as her most recent assault taught
her: “It’s an illusion, a fucking lie. There is no amount
of success or notoriety that makes you safe when you’re
a woman. None.”
Over lunch, she’d read me lyrics from her new single,
“Nightmare,” scatting the words “Come on, little lady,
give us a smile/No, I ain’t got nothing to smile about,”
explaining how she was going to see Bikini Kill that night
“to get some inspiration for my shows” and referring to
the song as a “protest record,” which she thinks has been
a long time coming. The actual song is not scatted so
much as screamed, Nineties-alt-rock-style. “When was
the last time you turned on the radio and heard a girl
screaming, yelling, angry about something?” she asks.
“That’s why I love Alanis. I want to turn on the radio and
hear a young woman be like, ‘Fuck no!’ You know what
I mean? Especially right now.”
Halsey confronted her recent sexual abuser, who she
says “took it seriously, went to rehab, sought therapy.”
She feels catharsis, feels confident that other women
will not be at risk from the same person acting the same
way. But she also understands — and resents — the risk
she takes by speaking out at all. “Then I’m not ‘Grammy-
nominated pop star,’ then I’m ‘rape survivor,’ ” she saysHalsey says
she’s been in
an extended
manic
period she
knows won’t
last. “I know
I’m just
going to get
depressed
and be
boring again
soon.”B