THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020 33
different world!” he said. “You take one
line out of context ...” For more than a
decade, Ames has been working in less
personal modes; his noir novel “You Were
Never Really Here” was recently made
into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix.
Apple said, “I haven’t wanted to drink
straight vodka so much in a while.”
“I’m triggering you,” Ames responded.
“You are,” she said, smiling wearily.
“It’s not your fault, Jonathan. I love you.”
When Ames stepped out briefly,
Apple said that what had frustrated her
was the idea that “there was a way out”—
that her pain was her choice.
Zelda Hallman, Apple’s housemate,
had been sitting with us, listening. She
pointed out that self-help books like
“The Secret” had the same problem:
they made your suffering all your fault.
“Fuck ‘The Secret’!” Apple shouted.
When Ames came back and men-
tioned Sarno again, Apple interrupted
him: “That’s a great way to be in regu-
lar life. But if you’re making a song?
And you’re making music and there is
going to be passion in it and there is
going to be anger in it?” She went on,
“You have to go to the myelin sheath—
you know, to the central nervous sys-
tem—for it to be good, I feel like. And
if that’s not true? Then fuck me, I wasted
my fucking life and ruined everything.”
She recalled a day when she had been
working on a piano riff that was down-
beat but also “fluttering, soaring,” and
that reminded her of Ames. She said
that he had asked her to name the re-
sulting song “Jonathan.” (The lovely, eerie
track, which is on “Idler Wheel,” includes
the line “You like to captain a capsized
ship.”) “No, no,” he said. “I didn’t!” As
Ames began telling his side of the story,
Apple said, icily, “I think that water is
going to get real cold real soon. You
should probably go to the beach.”
He went off to put on his bathing
suit. By the time he left, things had eased
up. She hugged him goodbye, looking
tiny. After Ames was gone, she said that
she hated the way she sometimes acted
with him—contemptuous, as if she’d ab-
sorbed the style of her most unkind ex-
boyfriend. But she also said that she
wouldn’t have called Ames himself stu-
pid, explaining, “He doesn’t talk the way
that I talk, and like my brother talks, and
get it all out, like, ‘What the fuck are you
talking about? That’s stupid!’ I’m not
necessarily angry when I’m doing that.”
The next day, she sent me a video.
“We’ve been to the beach!” she an-
nounced, panting, as Mercy ran around
in the background. “Because it’s her birth-
day!” Apple had taken Ames’s advice, she
said, and gone for a walk, behaving as if
she weren’t injured. So far, her knees didn’t
hurt. “Soooo ... he was right all along, ”
Apple said, her eyes wide. Then she
glanced at the camera slyly, the corner
of her mouth pulled up. “Orrrrr ... I just
rested my knees for a while.”A
pple goes to bed early; when I vis-
ited, we’d end things before she
drifted into a smeary, dreamy state, often
after smoking pot, which Hallman would
pass to her in the living room. Late one
afternoon, Apple talked about the al-
bum’s themes. She said, of the title, “Re-
ally, what it’s about is not being afraid
to speak.” Another major theme was
women—specifically, her struggle to “not
fall in love with the women who hate
me.” She described these songs as acts
of confrontation with her “shadow self,”
exploring questions like “Why in the
past have you been so socially blind to
think that you could be friends with your
ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend by getting
her a gift?” At the time, she thought that
she was being generous; now she recog-
nized the impulse as less benign, a way
of “campaigning not to be ousted.”
The record dives into such conflicting
impulses: she empathizes with other
women, rages at them, grows infatuatedwith them, and mourns their rejection,
sometimes all at once. She roars, in
“Newspaper,” “I wonder what lies he’s
telling you about me/To make sure that
we’ll never be friends!” In “Ladies,” she
describes, first with amusement, then in
a dark chant, “the revolving door which
keeps turning out more and more good
women like you/Yet another woman to
whom I won’t get through.” In “Shameka,”
she celebrates a key moment in middleschool, when a tough girl told the bul-
lied Apple, “You have potential.”
As a child, Apple longed to be “a pea
in a pod” with other girls, as she was, for
a while, with Manuela Paz, for whom
she wrote her first song. But as an adult
she has hung out mainly with men. She
does have some deep female friendships,
including with Nalini Narayan, an emer-
gency-room nurse, whom she met, in
1997, in the audience at one of her con-
certs, and who described Apple as “an
empath on a completely different level
than anyone I’ve met.” More recently,
Apple has become close with a few
younger artists. The twenty-one-year-
old singer Mikaela Straus, a.k.a. King
Princess, who recently recorded a cover
of Apple’s song “I Know,” called her “fam-
ily” and “a fucking legend.” Straus said,
“You never hear a Fiona Apple line and
say, ‘That’s cheesy.’” The twenty-seven-
year-old actress Cara Delevingne is an-
other friend; she visited Apple’s home
to record harmonies on the song “Fetch
the Bolt Cutters.” (She’s the one mak-
ing that kooky “meow.”)
But Apple has more complicated dy-
namics with a wider circle of friends,
exes, and collaborators. Starting with
her first heartbreak, at sixteen, she has
repeatedly found herself in love trian-
gles, sometimes as the secret partner,
sometimes as the deceived one. As we
talked, she stumbled on a precursor for
this pattern: “Maybe it’s because my
mother was the other woman?”
Apple’s parents met in 1969, during
rehearsals for “Applause,” a Broadway
musical based on “All About Eve.” Her
mother, McAfee, was cast as Eve; her fa-
ther, Maggart, as the married playwright.
Maggart was then an actor on the stage
and on TV (he’d been on “Sesame
Street”); the sexy, free-spirited McAfee
was a former June Taylor dancer.
Throughout Apple’s childhood, she and
her sister regularly visited the home, in
Connecticut, where Maggart’s five other
children and their mother, LuJan, lived.
LuJan was welcoming, encouraging all
the children to grow close—but Apple’s
mother was not invited. Apple, with an
uneasy laugh, told me that, for all the
time she’d spent interrogating her past,
this link had never crossed her mind.
Her fascination with women seemed
tied, too, to the female bonding of the
#MeToo era—to the desire to compare