Before we begin, Miley Cyrus would like to read something she’s written. She’s not sure what to call it, actually. At one point she says “op-ed,” but it’s not an op-ed. Statement? It’s kind of a statement. She’s trying to explain herself. In November, her home in Malibu, the one she shared with her partner, Liam Hemsworth, along with two pigs, two horses, four cats, and seven dogs, burned to the ground. About a month and a half later, right around Christmas, she and Hemsworth got married. She’s still trying to make sense of it all—how one thing led to the other.

Cyrus recently turned 26. The debut episode of Hannah Montana, the Disney show that made her famous, aired when she was 13, which means she’s now been a public figure—a teen idol, then pop star, then pariah, and on and on, to whatever she is now—for more than half of her life. She’s had three No. 1 albums. More than 82 million followers on Instagram—a number that grows by disconcerting amounts every day. On the day she announced her wedding: almost 400,000 new followers. This is far from the first time she’s had to do something like this—to work out who she is in front of an audience. In fact it’s all she knows, really. “I remember getting my license and it being a big deal that I was driving,” she says. “Almost like the milestones in my life were milestones for America. It almost felt like America was a weird godparent, you know?” Or maybe, now that she thinks about it, it was the other way around. “I was so influential in kids’ lives that I was like America’s nanny,” Cyrus says, laughing. “Like, ‘Just sit your kids in front of me and I’ll teach them how to be a good person.’ Which maybe backfired on the American godparent.”

In the time between Hannah Montana and now, Cyrus has experienced nearly every kind of attention this world is capable of giving—“the weight of a million eyeballs on you who will never have to deal with the criticism or the magnifying glᴀss that we deal with ever in their lives,” as her friend and fellow former child star, Ariana Grande, puts it. Cyrus has also become adept at disappearing when necessary. Last year, her plan was simple: hide out in Malibu, work on a new record, live life with her dogs and her pigs and her “survival partner,” which is what she called Hemsworth before what she calls him now, which is husband. But then came the fire, which banished her from Malibu, and the wedding, which brought her back, sharply, into the public eye, and suddenly it was 2019 and Cyrus found herself with a story she didn’t yet know how to tell. “Where I am in life right now is very complex, even to myself,” Cyrus says. “So I wrote something that, in my mind, could maybe come before our conversation.”