36 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020
“I don’t think that tooth is going anywhere.”••
“Bob’s Burgers,” and some numbers for
an animated musical sitcom, “Central
Park.” She was proud to hit deadlines, to
handle her own business. “I have a sense
of humor,” she told me. “I’m not that
fucking fragile all the time! I’m an adult.
You can talk to me.” But, before I arrived
one day, she texted that things weren’t
going well, so that I’d be prepared.
That afternoon, we found ourselves
lounging on the daybeds with Hallman,
watching “The Affair.” Apple had already
seen these episodes, which were from the
show’s penultimate season. In August,
she’d sent me a video of herself after
watching one, tears rolling down her face.
That episode was about the death of Al-
ison, one of the main characters. Played
by Ruth Wilson, Alison is a waitress liv-
ing in Montauk, an intense beauty who
is grieving the drowning death of her son
and suffers from depression and P.T.S.D.
She falls into an affair with a novelist,
and both of their marriages dissolve. The
story is told from clashing perspectives,
but in the episode that Apple had watched,
only one account felt “true”: an ex-boy-
friend of Alison’s breaks her skull, then
drops her unconscious body in the ocean,
making her death look like a suicide.
As we watched, Apple took notes, sit-
ting cross-legged on the daybed. She saw
herself in several characters, but she was
most troubled by an identification with
Alison, who worries that she’s a magnet
for pain—a victim that men try to “save”
and end up hurting. In one sequence,
Alison, devastated after a breakup, gets
drunk on a flight to California, as her
seat partner flirts aggressively, feeding
her cocktails. He assaults Alison as she
drifts in and out of consciousness. She
fights back, complaining to the flight at-
tendant, but the man turns it all around,
making her seem like the crazy one; she
winds up handcuffed, as other passen-
gers stare at her. Apple found the se-
quence horrifying—it reminded her of
how she came across in her worst press.
Her head lowered and her arms
crossed, she began to perseverate on her
fears of touring. She ticked off poten-
tial outcomes: “I say the right thing, but
I look the wrong way, so they say some-
thing about the way I look”; “I look the
right way, but I say the wrong thing, so
they say something mean about what I
said.” She went on, “I have a temper. I
have lots of rage inside. I have lots of
sadness inside of me. And I really, really,
really can’t stand assholes. If I’m in front
of one, and I happen to be in a public
place, and I lose my shit—and that’s a
possibility—that’s not going to be any
good to me, but I won’t be able to help
it, because I’ll want to defend myself.”
Later, we tried to listen to the album.
She played the newest version of “Rackof His,” but got frustrated by the tinny
compression. She worried that she’d built
“a record that can’t be made into a rec-
ord.” When she’d get mad, or say “fuck,”
Mercy would get agitated; wistfully, Apple
told me that she sometimes wished she
had a small dog that would let her be sad.
Despite her fears, she kept recording—
at the end of “For Her,” she’d multitracked
her voice to form a gospel-like chorus
singing, “You were so high”—and said
that she wanted the final result to be un-
compromising. “I want primary colors,”
she said. “I don’t want any half measures.”
We listened to “Heavy Balloon,” a
gorgeous, propulsive song about depres-
sion. She had added a new second verse,
partly inspired by the scene of Alison
drowning: “We get dragged down, down
to the same spot enough times in a
row/The bottom begins to feel like the
only safe place that you know.” Apple,
curling up on the floor, explained, “It’s
almost like you get Stockholm syndrome
with your own depression—like you’re
kidnapped by your own depression.” Her
voice got soft. “People with depression
are always playing with this thing that’s
very heavy,” she said. Her arms went up,
as if she were bouncing a balloon, pre-
tending to have fun, and said, “Like, ‘Ha,
ha, it’s so heavy!’” Then we had to stop,
because she was having a panic attack.A
pple has tried all kinds of cures. She
was sent to a family therapist at the
age of eleven, when, mad at her sister, she
glibly remarked, on a school trip, that she
planned to kill herself and take Amber
with her. After she was raped, she spent
hours at a Model Mugging class, prac-
ticing self-defense by punching a man in
a padded suit. In 2011, she attended eight
weeks of silent Buddhist retreats, medi-
tating from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., with no eye
contact—it was part of a plan to become
less isolated. She had a wild breakthrough
one day, in which the world lit up, show-
ing her a pulsing space between the peo-
ple at the retreat—a suggestion of some-
thing larger. That vision is evoked in the
new song “I Want You to Love Me,” in
which Apple sings, with raspy fervor, of
wanting to get “back in the pulse.”
She tried a method for treating
P.T.S.D. called eye-movement desensi-
tization and reprocessing therapy, and—
around the time she poured her vodka
down the drain, in 2018—an untested