July 2019 | Rolling Stone | 45
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ANROyoung 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 per-
son 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 says with a shudder. “Uh-
uh, no. Uh-uh, absolutely not. I have worked way too
fucking hard to be quantified or categorized by some-
thing like that.”
Or even be categorized at all. Identity is a tricky
thing for anyone, but especially for a pop starwhose personality tends to shift, she says, to match
whatever get-up she’s wearing. “I was talking to Dom
the other day, and I was like, ‘When you’re laying in
bed at night and you’re on tour and you miss me,
how do you picture me? Do you picture me with
short brown hair? Or long blond hair?’ And he’s
like, ‘I don’t really know.’ ” And the thing is, Halsey
doesn’t really know either. She can’t really picture
what she looks like. “And I’ve thought about that
for a while, and I’ve been like, ‘Is that a good thing
or a bad thing?’ Does that mean I have no sense of
identity? Or is it a good thing I don’t limit my per-
ception because I haven’t permitted myself to view
myself as one thing, because I haven’t stayed one
fucking thing long enough to be that?” She pauses,considering, waiting for an answer to present itself.
But of course no answer does.RE THESE JAY-Z’S HANGERS? Or
Patti Smith’s?” Halsey asks, eyeing
a rack of them in the dressing room
of Webster Hall in New York a cou-
ple of weeks later. “Why are there
so many hangers in this room?”
“I feel like Jay-Z probably has more outfit changes
than Patti Smith,” says her assistant Maria with a
shrug. “But who knows?”
Halsey smiles, but then asks Maria for a Midol.
Last night in her hotel room before going to sleep,
she’d prayed “kind of, not to a god or anything,”
that tonight’s show, her first headlining gig since
last summer, would go well. Then she’d woken up
to the immediate realization that she’d gotten her
period, which was Not Good News. “I feel like for a
normal female performer, she’s like, ‘Fuck, I have
my period. I have a show today.’ And for me, it’s like,
‘Fuck, I have my period. I hope I don’t have to go to
the hospital.’ ”
For a while, Halsey had been tormented by the
idea that she wouldn’t be able to have children, that
the endometriosis that could have caused her mis-
carriage would keep her from ever carrying a child
to term. But surgery and some lifestyle changes have
improved her health to the extent that her doctor
no longer thinks she needs to freeze her eggs, which
she had been planning to do this summer. “I was
like, ‘Wait, what did you just say? Did you just say I
can have kids?’ It was like the reverse of finding out
you have a terminal illness. I called my mom, crying.”
Halsey now jokes with Maria about having a “preg-
nancy pact” in which they agree to get pregnant to-
gether. “Never mind. I don’t need to put out a third
album. I’m just going to have a baby,” she announces.
And, actually, that’s not so hard to imagine. When
I met Halsey three years ago, her fame was acute-
ly new and destabilizing, even for someone with-
out a serious mental illness; for someone with one,
there was a sense that the whole situation could go
terribly awry, that behind her bluster, a real fragili-
ty was hiding out. Now that fragility seems to have
morphed into a sort of tenderness, chaotic but kind.
She no longer drinks hard alcohol, does drugs or
smokes pot. “I support my whole family,” she says.
“I have multiple houses, I pay taxes, I run a business.
I just can’t be out getting fucked up all the time.”
(She’s also profoundly amused by how much she can
“freak out rich white men. Like, ‘Are you a fucking
CEO? Same.’ ”)
Her only remaining vice is cigarettes, and she asks
if she can light one now and then sits, pantsless in
a ripped Marilyn Manson T-shirt, next to me on the
sofa. I ask if, despite initial signs to the contrary, her
success has been stabilizing. “Yeah, because it makes
me accountable,” she replies carefully, taking a drag.
“I’ve been committed twice since [I became] Halsey,
and no one’s known about it. But I’m [Cont. on 96]A