When she wasn’t releasing new music, readying her second album, or winning yet another Grammy, the 19-year-old singer-meets-style icon was assembling a scrapbook with her family that tracks her life from birth to, well, quarantine.
The artist whose first EP release asked that listeners “Don’t Smile at Me” went from a dirty blond with a big smile and a Justin Bieber iPod case into a much surlier teen—when, at 14 she dyed her hair the soon-to-be-iconic platinum, it “really switched something in me,” she writes.
For the fan and even casual observer, this is the part of the book where Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell—yes, that’s her real name—becomes Billie Eilish, the subversively blunt, fashionably alien, undeniably angel-voiced teen star.
Why did she want to dye her hair green? Why start wearing baggy designer clothes? Why, in one of the book’s more memorable photos, does she dress up in “normal clothes”—including skinny jeans, glasses, and a wig—for Ellen DeGeneres? And what do all of these moments reveal about this subversive teen? Eilish ain’t telling.
One innocuous photo is captioned as “the night we wrote about in ‘i love you,’ ” a song off her album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?; I love that song, but even I had to look up the lyrics to try to make the connection.
But the family isn’t waxing philosophical, just nostalgic, and the experience is often more like sitting with people you don’t know very well as they force you to go through their extremely long family scrapbook with them, sometimes even skipping around without warning.
I want to give you a big pile of pictures that speak for themselves.” And that is exactly what she did—which frankly, for someone as uniquely visual as Eilish is with her work, makes a whole lot more sense than the alternative.
She’s a pretty dang normal girl from a doting nuclear family in Los Angeles, who loves her friends and makes goofy faces—well, except for that part where she’s achieved unfathomable amounts of fame before her 20th birthday.