I Spread Like Strawberries: Fiona Apple, Rape Stories, and Getting Free

Please note a trigger warning of sexual violence and depression in this essay.

Downtown Manhattan, 1997: Fiona Apple is standing in a studio having her picture taken. She’s a twenty-year-old piano prodigy turned pop star sensation, high off the release of her debut album, Tidal. In the studio are black leather couches, big windows, and even bigger speakers blasting the Notorious B.I.G. Stylists, publicists, and journalists mill about, all watching Fiona in her signature white tank top and heavy mascara. In the center of the room, the photographer barks at her: “Give me sexy! Seduce the camera!”

During a break, with the camera turned away, Fiona chants to herself: “There’s no hope for women, there’s no hope for women, there’s no hope for women.” A journalist overhears and so Fiona’s legacy is made: today, you can buy the catchphrase “There’s No Hope For Women” on a tee shirt with Fiona’s face on it for $24.15. Later, when asked about the moment, Fiona will say, “Yeah, if you want to see me cry, come to a photo shoot. … They treat me like I’m a hotel room.”

Fiona Apple was raped when she was 12 years old. In the late 90s, around the time Tidal came out and her face first graced magazine covers, she often spoke about the incident in interviews—in the very same Spin cover story where Fiona decides there isn’t any hope, the journalist writes, “Then suddenly she’s talking about when she was raped. She doesn’t wait to be asked about it; she just quietly tells me, sitting forward in an overstuffed chair with her feet splayed but her back straight and her head tipped down.”

In Fiona’s own words: “I was in the hall, home from school. It was the day before Thanksgiving, 1989. I got off the elevator, and this guy came toward me, and I remember thinking that he wanted to hurt me … so I thought I’d better memorize what he looked like. In order to tell people later. Except, he kept coming toward me.” It’s a well-trodden, tragic story, told again and again to journalists from Rolling Stone, Interview Magazine, The New York Times. It has become so embedded in Fiona’s public image that, often, journalists don’t wait for an invitation. In 1999, one writer from The Los Angeles Times asked point-blank: “Do you think that being raped at age 12 has made you more adamant about being open and vulnerable?”

Watching Fiona go from interview to interview, at age 19, 20, 21 recounting her rape story for anyone who will listen, reminds me of something Claudia Rankine once said: “I think surely some percentage of women hasn’t been raped … then I think, maybe, that ‘what woman hasn’t been raped’ could be another way of saying ‘this is the most miserable in my life.’” Listening to Fiona’s newest album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, you get the sense that you are listening to a woman who has known misery, who knows what it means to be miserable, and who sings with the rubble of rock bottom still stuck to her skin.

In “For Her,” one of the most arresting songs on the record, Fiona chronicles the rape of a close friend, whose pain and self-doubt gradually grow to be infused with fury. The song is extraordinary in its clear intent to move its subject beyond guilt, to shift its artistic discussion of rape from narrative arc to true feeling. Fiona sings, “she’s tired of planting her knees on the cold, hard floor of facts / trying to act like the other girl acts … / you tie everything all pretty in the second act / when you know that it didn’t go exactly like that”. At the peak, she belts, “well, good morning, good morning / you raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”, a lyric so blunt and crushing as to defy commentary. 

This is an album about the rape story. So you tell the tale, you look the pain in the eye, and then what? Can you be raped without being turned forever into something beyond yourself? Can you write the word rape without your reader closing the book? With Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Fiona says: yes, you can. 

Most striking about this record is Fiona’s ability to hit such diverse emotional chords, all equally guttural and hurtful and real: resentment, envy, embarrassment, defiance. The lyrics are beautiful but, ultimately, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a story about going beyond speaking pain out loud—it is a story about leaving the words behind, about getting free, about moving forward, onward, toward the pulse of life. And make no mistake: this freedom is found not in spite of the misery and anger chronicled in songs like “For Her”. Rather, it is because Fiona can stare so unflinchingly at her own emotions, at her own rape, that Fetch the Bolt Cutters becomes an album about rising from pain instead of dwelling in it.

A self-made liberation truly soars in songs like the titular “Fetch the Bolt Cutters”, wherein Fiona looks back on her early years in the music industry—chronicling a feeling of suffocation by all the VIPs, PYTs, and wannabes who “stole her fun” and informed her that she wasn’t “stylish enough” or that she “cried too much.” She sings a gorgeous rebellion: “I grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill / shoes that were not made for running up that hill / and I need to run up that hill / I need to run up that hill / I will, I will, I will, I will, I will”.

“Heavy Balloon”, the ninth track on the record, opens with a deep hum: “people like us, we play with a heavy balloon / keep it up to keep the devil at bay, but it always falls way too soon”. Here depression takes the form of a huge black balloon, floating in thin air one moment and weighing you down the next. Fiona says that she was inspired to write the song “years ago, because a boyfriend of mine was talking to me about his father and his depression.” In the song, she and the father figure are joined together by the duty of this feeling, the labor it takes to keep a heavy balloon up, and up, and up. As Fiona explains: “oh my God, this is not staying off me long enough, I just can’t really move around. It’s this hindrance, this obligation, this constant thing to be taken care of.”  

Like the rest of the album, “Heavy Balloon” doesn’t just live in one room. As “For Her” isn’t only a song about rape and “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” isn’t only a song about youth, “Heavy Balloon” moves beyond a one-note narrative of depression. Together, this collection of songs reminds us that it’s easy to tell a story about pain, to diagnose yourself as the Sullen Girl, the Pained Woman. Getting free is the hard part. Putting on a name is always easier than taking one off, but Fiona reminds us over and over throughout Fetch the Bolt Cutters that it’s the only way we can step out of misery. 

The soul of “Heavy Balloon”—and indeed, of the record as a whole—is a message of growth. Towards the end of the song, Fiona throws a wrench in her own depression metaphor, growling out “but you know what? … / I spread like strawberries / I climb like peas and beans”. It’s like this, she tells us in another interview: “I got that out of a children’s gardening book. Because strawberries are rhizomes, and so they grow in this network sideways, and peas and beans, they climb up, you can put them on trellises and stuff. … And like, I’m all right, it’s okay, don’t worry about me. I’m like strawberries, I’m going to spread myself out and take over this whole garden.”