44 | Rolling Stone | July 2019
was supposed to represent a power struggle; I wasn’t
like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go do some fucking dyke
shit on TV!’ ”), was she truly bisexual if she was only
publicly dating men?
Now, in her sunny and spotless kitchen, with an
artfully arranged cheese plate resting on the counter
and the pasta water coming to a boil, Halsey looks
at me, smiles and adds some more spice to the pot.
ACK IN HIGH SCHOOL, back when
she was still Ashley Nicolette Fran-
gipane, back before she took her
stage name from a subway stop in
Brooklyn near where a heroin-ad-
dicted boyfriend once lived, Halsey
was a misfit, hiding out in the art room where the
bullies were unlikely to venture. Never mind the AP
classes, the gymnastics routines, the school yearbook
she edited; these wholesome activities were undercut
by others more suspicious to the teenage mind: cut-
ting off all her hair, playing music in the coffee shop
of the neighboring town, going to shows in the city,
and speaking her mind. When she was 15, she talked
her mom into letting her get her first tattoo; in fact,
they went to get matching ones together.
The animus of her high school peers drove her
online, where Tumblr became
a dumping ground for artwork
and poetry and songs she’d writ-
ten satirizing such things as Taylor
Swift’s relationship with Harry
Styles. There, she could see what
people responded to, and she could
see that they responded, for some
reason, to various versions of her.
She dropped out of community col-
lege, which she found to be a waste
of time, and doubled down, cre-
ating a platform before most peo-
ple understood what that was. “My
mom was like, ‘Your real life sucks.
You have no friends. You decided
not to go to college. You live in this
fantasy world on the internet,’ ” she
says. “And I was trying to explain
to her, like, ‘I’m building a brand.’
And she was like, ‘You’re building a
fucking what?’ ”
Leaving home to couch-surf in
Brooklyn and the Lower East Side
gave her a chance to give that brand
a test drive. “Nobody knew me, so I could be any-
one I wanted to be,” she says. And what she wanted
to be was “just an amalgamation of other people I
liked. A little Jagger, a little Alex Turner, a little Patti
Smith, a little fucking Effy from Skins, a little Clemen-
tine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and
a little Winona Ryder, Girl, Interrupted. It was every-
thing that spoke to my fabricated angst, you know?”
Technically homeless, she romanticized her bo-
hemian life online and kept the ways in which she
struggled — the minimum-wage jobs, the indignities
of having only $9 to your name — to herself. Recently,
when she talked about sleeping with men merely for
a place to stay, “it of course turns into this hyper-
bolized fantasy of ‘Halsey the Hooker,’ ” she scoffs. “I
didn’t have a pimp, no one was handing me money.
But I was definitely dating dudes I wasn’t into be-
cause I could crash at their apartment. I was having
sex as a means of survival. I’m lucky that that’s all it
was for me; for other women I knew, it wasn’t just
that. That’s the point I was trying to make.”
Whatever she was doing to get by, it turned out
that what she was expert at was creating a story and
then manifesting it in real life, so much so that when
she turned up for a meeting at Astralwerks with all
her possessions in a bag at her feet, she seemed so
fully formed as an artist that Glenn Mendlinger, the
guy who signed her, couldn’t help but think, “ ‘Are we
being punked?’ She was talking about the arc of cam-
paigns and mood boards and textures, and she had
25,000 followers on Twitter.”
It’s a power she still wields, turning stories into
realities in her day-to-day life, setting the scene and
casting herself into whatever role she fancies. Last
night, for instance, the scene was “Indie Film” and
Halsey was the artsy heroine, with a supporting lead
in the form of her boyfriend, Dom-
inic Harrison, otherwise known as
the British alt-rocker Yungblud. “We
were just sitting around in our un-
derwear working on poetry on our
typewriters like fucking losers in an
indie movie,” she says. “I ordered
Chinese food, listened to almost the
entire Beatles anthology, went to
sleep around two or three.”
It is a fact of her life, and a con-
dition of her bipolar disorder, that
Halsey does not always quite know
what version of herself she’ll be
when she wakes up. Diagnosed at
age 17 after a suicide attempt, she
says that she has for some time now
been in an extended manic period
that she knows won’t last forever.
“I know I’m just going to get fuck-
ing depressed and be boring again
soon,” she tells me, frowning. “And
I hate that that’s a way of thinking.
Every time I wake up and realize
I’m back in a depressive episode,
I’m bummed. I’m like, ‘Fuck. Fuck! This is where
we’re going now? OK... .’ ”
The mania, she thinks, may suit her, even if it can
make her more volatile, more prone to doing “crazy
shit.” She’d been manic the first time we met too,
when I wrote about her in 2016. That day, the plan
had been to meet in New York’s Central Park for a
“picnic,” though Halsey and I had gone straight for
the Veuve Clicquot rosé. We were both in a precari-
ous place, and we could somehow sense that in theother. Before long, we were talking about the mis-
carriages we’d recently had and weeping together
in the midday sun. Later, the same Halsey who has
been unremittingly open about her bipolar disorder,
her bisexuality, her relationships and her suicide
attempt would tell other journalists that her miscar-
riage is the one detail she regrets sharing. And I was
the one who shared it.
Now, Halsey thinks back to how it all went down,
the torrent of misogyny I’d brought upon her by writ-
ing about that intimate experience, one inevitably
cast by the Halsey haters of the world as manipula-
tive, attention-seeking, maybe even a lie: “It was just
really weird, to see how people were like, ‘Well, I’m
going to police the validity of this experience that she
had.’ You know?”
I start to apologize, but she gently stops me. “I
appreciate you saying that,” she says, “but defi nitely
it had nothing to do with you and everything to do
with the way people perceive the female experi-
ence.” By this point we’ve both gorged on her spicy
rigatoni ( perfectly spicy, worth the hype) under a
huge, framed picture of Kurt Cobain at Reading and
Leeds and have moved to the living room, where
there’s a type writer on the coffee table, a large crate
for Halsey’s dog, Jagger, and a half-finished painting
leaning against a column in the middle of the room
next to a Polaroid camera and a palette of paint.
(“I’m doing this series of paintings where water-
melon is representative of this taboo female sexual-
ity,” she tells me. “I know it sounds really weird, but
I promise it makes sense.”)
In fact, the female experience is something
Halsey’s been thinking about a lot, giving speeches at
the Women’s March and other venues in which she’s
referenced being sexually abused by a family friend
when she was a child, forced into sex by a boyfriend
when she was a teenager and sexually assaulted just a
couple of years ago, something from which she’d as-
sumed her fame made her immune. “Here’s what’s
fucked up to me,” she says pointedly. “A young man
seeks success and power so that he can use it to con-
trol people, and a young woman seeks success and
power so that she no longer has to worry about being
controlled.” But it turned out that even that problem-
atic setup had been grossly optimistic, as her most
recent assault taught her: “It’s an illusion, a fucking
lie. There is no amount of success or notoriety that
makes you safe when you’re a woman. None.”
Over lunch, she’d read me lyrics from her new
single, “Nightmare,” scatting the words “Come on,
little lady, give us a smile/No, I ain’t got nothing to
smile about,” explaining how she was going to see
Bikini Kill that night “to get some inspiration for my
shows” and referring to the song as a “protest re-
cord,” which she thinks has been a long time coming.
The actual song is not scatted so much as screamed,
Nineties-alt-rock-style. “When was the last time you
turned on the radio and heard a girl screaming, yell-
ing, angry about something?” she asks. “That’s why
I love Alanis. I want to turn on the radio and hear aHalsey
says she’s
been in an
extended
manic
period
she knows
won’t last.
“I know
I’m just
going to get
depressed
and be
boring
again soon.”THE
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