Over the years since she shot to fame as a young teenager, Billie Eilish has gained huge success.
In fact, the 20-year-old singer-songwriter is already halfway to achieving the super-rare EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards) status!
Aside from her career-focused accolades, however, Billie has long been vocal about one of her biggest goals in life, which is to have children.
The artist has spoken out about her desire to be a parent on several occasions, revealing just last year that she’s pretty set on having a huge family of her own. “I want to have kids and I want those kids to have kids,” she told Vanity Fair in January 2021.
And now, in a new interview with the Sunday Times, Billie has doubled down on her stance, declaring that she’s super-keen on having children in the future.
And the young artist made it clear that she isn’t just half-heartedly hoping to have kids — Billie said she’d “rather die” than not start a family of her own.
However, Billie still has reservations about raising children, as she admitted that she “dreads” the idea of them not listening to her if they ever were to clash.
“The older I get, the more I experience things, I just think, uuggh, what am I going to do when my kid thinks that this is the right thing to do and I’m, like, no, it’s not! And they won’t listen to me,” she said.
Going on to reflect on her own childhood, Billie opened up about her debilitating separation anxiety, when she didn't want to be away from her parents at all.
“I was worried about what would happen to them, I was worried about what would happen to me, I was worried about being forgotten.”
In fact, things were so tough for Billie that she wound up sharing a bed with her parents and elder brother, Finneas O’Connell, for years of her childhood. The Sunday Times notes that the “whole family shared a bed until Finneas was ten,” and Billie stayed “with her parents until she was 11.”
“I couldn’t sleep by myself,” Billie said. “If I woke up and my parents weren’t in the bed and the lights were off, I would scream until they came to the door. And I couldn’t step off the bed in the dark because I was certain that there were scorpions crawling all over the floor.”
Elsewhere in the wide-ranging interview, Billie touched on the attention that's been paid to her evolving style over the years that she’s been in the spotlight.
If you didn’t know, the young artist was well known for the casual, oversize outfits she rocked during the early years of her career, which she revealed she wore to avoid being body-shamed or sexualized.
However, Billie would go on to occasionally ditch her signature looks for more “feminine” outfits, which also included swapping her famous black and green locks for a new blonde ’do last March.
Then, perhaps most memorably, the singer broke the internet in May 2021 when she posed in lingerie on the cover of Vogue magazine.
Sadly, some critics slammed the photo shoot as “cringy” and “disingenuous.” In fact, Billie recalled losing 100,000 followers after posting a picture wearing a corset and a lace bra, suggesting that some people had an “attachment” to her signature style, which she branded “very dehumanizing.”
At the time, Billie also condemned those who’d criticized her Vogue cover, saying: “It was supposed to be a specific aesthetic for a photo shoot, and then it was like, ‘Billie Eilish's new style’ … It was so weird because I was like, ‘It’s not a new style, it's one thing I wore.’”
Discussing the topic once again months later, Billie called out social media users who had pitted her two distinct styles against each other and drawn unwarranted comparisons.
“I saw a picture of me on the cover of Vogue [from] a couple of years ago with big, huge oversize clothes [next to] the picture of [the latest Vogue]. Then the caption was like, ‘That's called growth,’” she told Rolling Stone last June. “I understand where they're coming from, but at the same time, I’m like, ‘No, that’s not OK ... I didn’t need to grow from that.’”
Now Billie has addressed the subject further, admitting to the Sunday Times that she doesn’t know if she was truly being herself when she opted for the more “feminine” look with the Vogue shoot.
“Looking back at all of the promo and stuff we did before the album [in 2021], I’m, like, don’t know who that is, but that is not me,” she said. “I didn’t have any time to think. I just decided who I was. I just became that vibe. And I don’t know if that was necessarily what I really was feeling. I was just grasping onto anything.”
“I do have this worry that I felt so undesirable that I may have occasionally tried too hard to be desirable,” she said. “It makes me sad to think about.”
However, Billie added that she’s grown to feel “desirable” in whatever clothing she chooses to wear, seemingly regardless of people’s opinions.
“Being known for the whole start of your career for one thing — she wears baggy clothes and she sings like this — it was driving me mad,” she said.
“Wearing baggy clothes, nobody is attracted to me, I feel incredibly unlovable and unsexy and not beautiful, and people shame you for not being feminine enough. Then you wear something more revealing and they’re, like, you’re such a fat cow whore,” she said.
“I’m a slut and I’m a sell-out and I’m just like every other celebrity selling their bodies,” she continued, quoting the criticism faced by herself and others. “What the fuck do you want? It’s a crazy world for women and women in the public eye.”
“In the past couple of months I feel far more solid in who I am,” she added. “I feel different now, like I’m desirable. I feel like I’m capable of being as feminine as I want to be and as masculine as I want.”
