Famous Self-Harmers

Fiona Apple

Daughter of former singer Diane McAfee and actor . She was classically trained as a pianist as a child and began composing songs when she was eight years old. She crafted a demo tape while in Los Angeles finishing High School. When she returned home to New York for Christmas one of the tapes found its way to a friend who supervised the care of a music industry executive's children..." Fiona Apple was raped outside of her mother's apartment at the age of twelve. For years after her rape she would check her closets to make sure no one was hiding in the house and would be nervous around older men. And she still continues to have bad, violent dreams. During her teens and the months she spent making her album, Tidal, she suffered with an eating disorder.

When Fiona read her first bad review for Tidal she began scratching her left wrist with the fingernails of her right hand. She scratched all the way up her arm, there are still some dark patches on her wrists, where she dug the deepest. Fiona said, "I have a little bit of a problem with that. It's a common thing." When asked if it made her feel better she simply replied, "It just makes you feel." Fiona also sometimes bites her lips as hard as she can, sometimes until they bleed. "And it'll be bleeding, and I can't stop, because it almost feels so good when I bite my lip." Trying to explain her actions she said, "It was never, like, 'I am going to hurt myself and put myself in the hospital.' ...It is that I am going to give myself the pain that I need to feel to put the punctuation on this sh*t that's going inside."

Fiona would get frustrated and sad when she feel that people think she's "crazy." She says, "The most annoying thing for me to hear about myself is that I'm trying to make people have a pity party for me. Everything that I've gone through has been dramatized by the people who've written about it, not by me. I'm just saying, 'This happened to me, this happened to a lot of people.' Why should I hide sh*t? Why does that 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."

Fiona Apple has become a happier and more confident individual since she talked so frankly about her past self-injury and eating disorder to Rolling Stone. Articles in several magazines and newspapers, including The Washington Post and USA Today, mention different new aspects of Fiona, such as her new take on life, a healthy weight gain and a new-found confidence in herself and her music. In a USA Today interview she said still gets upset when she reads a particularly bad article about herself or review of her music but does not mention any further self-injurious behavior as a result.