Entertainment

Ariana Grande on trauma: There’s a lot I’ll never be ready to talk about

The US pop star said that she is “the luckiest girl in the world, and the unluckiest”.
The US pop star said that she is “the luckiest girl in the world, and the unluckiest”. The US pop star said that she is “the luckiest girl in the world, and the unluckiest”.

Ariana Grande has said that there is a lot she will “probably never be ready to talk about” concerning the Manchester terror attack at her concert two years ago.

The US pop star, who had just finished her performance at the Manchester Arena on May 22 2017 when a suicide bomber killed 22 people, said that she struggles to discuss it even now, because her thoughts are with the families involved.

Grande, 26, told America’s Vogue magazine: “It’s not my trauma. It’s those families’.

“It’s their losses, and so it’s hard to just let it all out without thinking about them reading this and reopening the memory for them.”

Grande, who held a star-studded fundraising concert in the city two weeks after the attack, said that she feels she did “nothing”.

She said: “I’m proud that we were able to raise a lot of money with the intention of giving people a feeling of love or unity, but at the end of the day, it didn’t bring anyone back.

“Everyone was like, Wow, look at this amazing thing, and I was like, What the f*** are you guys talking about?

Ariana Grande
Ariana Grande Ariana Grande performing during the One Love Manchester benefit concert (Dave Hogan for One Love Manchester/PA)

“We did the best we could, but on a totally real level we did nothing. I’m sorry.”

She added: “I have a lot to say that could probably help people that I do want to share, but I have a lot that I still need to process myself and will probably never be ready to talk about.

“For a long time I didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything, because I didn’t want to think about anything. I kind of just wanted to bury myself in work and not focus on the real stuff, because I couldn’t believe it was real.”

Grande, who over the past year has also dealt with the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller and the breakdown of her high profile engagement to comedian Pete Davidson, also described herself as “the luckiest girl in the world, and the unluckiest”.

The Vogue cover star said: “I’m walking this fine line between healing myself and not letting the things that I’ve gone through be picked at before I’m ready, and also celebrating the beautiful things that have happened in my life and not feeling scared that they’ll be taken away from me because trauma tells me that they will be, you know what I mean?”

Rapper Miller died in September last year, and Grande said that she can barely remember the months afterwards “because I was (a) so drunk and (b) so sad”.