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Miller’s death, in May 2017, Grande
had just finished the encore of a sold-
out show on her Dangerous Woman
tour in Manchester, England, when a
suicide bomber detonated in the foy-
er, leaving 23 people dead, including
an eight-year-old concertgoer. Shell-
shocked and reeling, Grande and her
mother, who was in the audience that
night, flew home to Florida. (The tweet
she mustered the next day was for a
time the most-liked in the medium’s
history: “broken. from the bottom
of my heart, i am so so sorry. i don’t
have words.”) But she quickly deter-
mined that before she was going to sing
anywhere again, she needed to sing in
Manchester. She returned two weeks
later to visit survivors in hospitals and
families in mourning. And she staged a
benefit concert that raised $25 million.
Guest stars included Coldplay, Katy
Perry, and Justin Bieber, and Grande
cruised the stage belting out her dirtiest
songs at the request of one victim’s
mother after it was suggested that the
bomber, who had links to the Islamic
State, had acted in protest of her racy
pop persona.
But it was Grande’s culminating
rendition of “Over the Rainbow,”
intoned through her sobs, that is the
night’s eternal image. If you didn’t
know Ari, as her friends call her, ifyou sorted into that other group
and assumed that Grande was a lab-
engineered Frankensinger, a sexy
cyborg extruding melismas in baby
doll dresses and kitten ears, here may
have been the first piece of evidence
to the contrary. “Ariana’s an open
book,” says her friend Miley Cyrus,
who flew over for the concert. “She
has always shared her experiences with
this beautiful blend of reality and the
fantasy that pop culture requires. But
holding her in my arms that night and
feeling her shake from the loss of lives,
literally feeling her heart pounding
against mine—when you can let down
the personas and cry with the rest of