TAKING CARE
Young fans struggling with depression routinely
reach out to Eilish. “These are girls for whom
Billie is their lifeline,” says her mother, Maggie.
“It’s very intense.” Prada Linea Rossa jacket
and pants. Jacob & Co. ring. Nike sneakers.prodigy and Eilish’s best friend and con-
stant collaborator, certainly paved the
way. “Music was always underlying,” she
explains. “I always sang. It was like wearing
underwear: It was just always underneath
whatever else you were doing.”
She wrote her first song on the ukulele
at age seven, and she soon taught herself
how to play piano and guitar from watching
YouTube videos. She was willfully indepen-
dent, never pushed to the stage. “You know
how there’s always that singer kid who’s like,
‘I can sing!’ and then would sing in front
of you? I remember hating that person.
The kid who does it for the applause and
thinks they’re amazing, and their mom is
like, ‘Yeah, she’s gonna be da-da-da.’ I never
put myself in that category, so for a long
time I didn’t realize that I was a singer, too.”E
ilish and her brother were home-
schooled for a variety of reasons.
Patrick had read an article about
the Oklahoma sibling band Han-
son and was drawn to the idea that home-
schooling had given them the freedom to
focus on their artistic interests. Maggie
is from Colorado, where the Columbine
massacre had taken place two years after
Finneas was born, and they were both older
parents who liked the idea of spending as
much time as they could with their kids.
Finneas was an eccentric child who slept
in cowboy boots for two years. Billie has
an auditory-processing disorder that affects
her ability to retain information aurally,
and she also has Tourette’s syndrome, with
especially severe motor tics connected to the
stress of mathematics. (Despite YouTube
catalogs of her tics, which consist in part
of involuntary eye movements that have
sometimes been mistaken for eye rolls, she
says that she now has the illness under good
control without medication.) “I’m so glad
I didn’t go to school, because if I had, I
would never have the life I have now,” Eilish
says. “The only times I ever wished I could
go were so I could fuck around. At times I
just wanted to have, like, a locker, and have
a school dance that was at my own school,
and get to not listen to the teacher and
laugh in class. Those were the only things
that were interesting to me. And once I real-
ized that, I was like, Oh, I actually don’t
want to do the school part of school at all.”
Eilish had enormous amounts of ener-
gy, which her parents sought to dissipatePhotographed by Harley Weir
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