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Fiona Apple - a brief annotated biography
The basic text is from the Wikipedia profile
plus a few other sites, as noted.
Boxes like this contain notes and links to related material on the
Talent Development Resources site and blogs, indicating some of the
many aspects of her life that may resonate with contemporary artists
and other gifted and talented people.
Notes
/ annotations by site author Douglas Eby.
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Fiona
Apple is a member of a family rich with roots in entertainment.
Born in New York City [in 1977], she is the daughter of singer Diane
McAfee and actor Brandon Maggart. Her older sister, Amber Taleullah,
sings cabaret under the stage name Maude Maggart.
At the age of twelve, Apple was raped upon returning home from school
to her mother's apartment. The rape is mentioned subtly in some of her
work (as in the song "Sullen Girl"), but is not necessarily a major
theme.
Many artists, of course, use their work to
express and deal with painful experiences.
Psychologist Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D. notes in his book, "Anger,
Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil,
and Creativity," that our impulse to be creative "can be understood to
some degree as the subjective struggle to give form, structure and
constructive expression to inner and outer chaos and conflict."
[From interview: The
Psychology of Creativity.]
Related pages:
Abuse &
creative expression .. Healing & art
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While the media latched onto the story of Apple's dark past experience,
the singer said the only reason she even mentioned the rape to an
interviewer was because she didn't want it to seem like something of
which she should be ashamed.
As a child, there was concern she had anti-social tendencies, as well
as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
She
underwent therapy as a child after telling a childhood friend that she
was going to kill herself as well as her older sister Amber...
As I note in my article Cognitive
Accommodations to Childhood Sexual Abuse, a survivor of abuse may
incorporate into their self-image negative or distorted
ideas such as personal "badness" or being wrongfully different or
inferior, or experience destructive feelings such as shame and guilt.
Abuse may
incite or lead to acting-out, self-injury, substance abuse, depression,
eating disorders, low self esteem, social alienation and other mental
health and personal challenges.
Other related articles of mine are Shame,
and Bad Seed
- Antecedents of Teen Violence.
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Another site [Celebrities
with Eating Disorders] says Apple became anorexic as a reaction to
being raped, and quotes her [from a 1998 Rolling Stone interview]: "I
definitely had an eating disorder. What was really frustrating for me
was that everyone thought I was anorexic, and I wasn't.
"I was
really depressed and self-loathing. For me, it wasn't about being thin,
it was about getting rid of the bait attached to my body. A lot of it
came from the self-loathing that came from being raped at the point of
developing my voluptuousness.
"I
just thought that if you had a body and if you had anything on you that
would be grabbed, it would be grabbed. So I did purposely get rid of
it."
Many girls have conflicts about their
sexuality and reactions by others - see the page Sexuality:
teen/young adult.
And
many
talented women have suffered from eating disorders, including actors
Scarlett Pomers, Felicity Huffman and Jane Fonda. See the page Eating
disorders.
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The site Self-Injury:
A Struggle - Famous Self-Injurers [among others]
says Apple has self-injured [scratching her arm, biting her lip] and
quotes her as explaining it was to "give myself the pain that I need to
feel to put the punctuation on this shit that's going inside."
And
she added, "Why should I hide shit? Why does [injuring myself] give
people a bad opinion of me? It's a reality. A lot of people do it.
Courtney Love pulled me aside at a party and showed me her marks."
Public figures that are reported to have
engaged in self-injury include Angelina Jolie, Christina Ricci,
Princess Diana, Johnny Depp, Courtney Love and others.
[From the
page Cutting]
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In 1996 Fiona Apple's debut album, Tidal, was released. "Criminal," the
third single, became her breakthrough hit. The song reached the top
forty on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and garnered a great deal of
attention, mostly due to its controversial Mark Romanek-directed music
video.
While manager Slater says he considered the clip a "tribute to
[director Gregg] Araki and [photographer] Nan Goldin", some interpreted
it as a "sex tease".
Years
later Apple said: "The shit that got me popular was the stuff that I
was not proud of... I wanted to be like every other girl you see in
videos, and that's why it's embarrassing." ... Years later, she said
that the video fit with the song and that it was "beautiful."
While accepting the 1997 MTV Video Music Award for "Best New Artist",
she proclaimed: "This world is bullshit, and you shouldn't model your
life on what you think that we think is cool, and what we're wearing
and what we're saying", referring to the mainstream music industry.
She
quoted Maya Angelou: "Go with yourself".
Some considered her remarks hypocritical, seeing a contradiction
between her appearance in a risqué music video in only her
underwear, and her telling young women to ignore celebrity culture. She
was unapologetic, however: "When I have something to say, I'll fuckin'
well say it".
On her official site www.fiona-apple.com,
she writes, "As you may know, I am a girl prone to low-days. I don't
know how many times I got to soundcheck, in a grumpy nasty, teary rut.."
On her song Extraordinary machine, the lyrics include: "But I'm good at
being uncomfortable so I can't stop changing all the time.... But he's
no good at being uncomfortable so he can't stop staying exactly the
same..."
Many artists and other talented people
experience anxiety and
depression - see the pages :
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Fiona Apple took six years off from performing before releasing her
latest album “Extraordinary Machine” [in 2005].
She
says, “I realized that after six years of not doing this kind of stuff,
it doesn’t define who I am, and I’ll be just fine without it. It’s not
a life-or-death-thing anymore, or at least it doesn’t feel that
anymore.
"And I
also think it is also getting a little bit more grown up. I’m more
secure in who I am and I don’t need everybody’s approval as much
(laughs)... As much!"
[From
my Women and Talent post Taking
a creative renewal break.]
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