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After eight years away from the spotlight, acclaimed musician Fiona Apple returned with an album in 2020. While promoting the album, Fiona, who is friends with the insanely successful Quentin Tarantino, revealed some particularly intimate details about her life.

Her 2020 album, "Fetch The Bolt Cutters", which features the standout track "Shameika", almost requires her to address her private life. This is true of most of the "Criminal" singer's work. Everything is intensely personal to the point where it causes fans to question.

One of the things that they wonder about is Fiona's relationship with women. While she has been described as a feminist rockstar, Fiona has admitted to having a very challenging relationship with those who share her biology. This is particularly apparent in "Shameika", as discussed in an eye-opening interview with Vulture from 2020.

Fiona Apple Was "Traumatized" By Women

Fiona Apple has been very open about some of the things she suffered in her life, particularly at the beginning of her career. While she has certainly made comments about the absolutely horrendous misdeeds of men in her life, her anguish has mostly been sparked by women in her youth.

"My middle-school experience is still so important to me. Mainly because that’s where my relationship to women started getting f***ed up," Fiona admitted in her interview with Vulture.

"It’s awful how many memories I have with a friend where a more popular girl says to that friend, 'Okay, you can be friends with Fiona or you can be friends with me. Choose.' And I never got chosen."

While Fiona said that she found boys to be "kind of stupid mean", she hasn't been "traumatized" by them as much as she has been by women. Perhaps this explains her mostly positive relationships with her exes, including her ex-husband Lionel Deluy.

"I’m not traumatized by boys bullying me. I’m more traumatized by girls rolling their eyes at me," Fiona said.

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Fiona went on to explain that she got "silenced" numerous times by other young women. Especially while at school. And these experiences caused her to hold back from being who she wanted to be.

"I silenced myself because I was afraid of the other girls saying I wasn’t cool. I didn’t try out fashion or anything like that because the other girls would say I look stupid in it. It was all about what other girls thought of me. And knowing that they didn’t think I was cool at that age made me feel like I was never cool to girls after that. Middle school is where my sense of myself started based on what other people thought of me."

In the interview with Vulture, Fiona added that these horrible experiences with girls at school replayed in her dreams... Quite frequently. But this has changed as she's evolved as a person. While she claims to still dream of these girls, her interactions with them in her dreams are far more peaceful.

How Fiona Apple Is Repairing Her Relationship With Women

Fiona credits her music for helping her through her relationships with women. Particularly, her 2020 album, "Fetch The Bolt Cutters", did wonders.

"I made the album, and it helped me. I’m over the hump of a lot of the things I was dealing with on the album. Which means it was successful, you know?" Fiona said before admitting that the main reason she makes music is to help herself live life.

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It's not about the financial rewards. It's about the emotional ones.

"You’ve got these stories you’re not telling anybody. Each one of those stories is like this little ball of yarn. If you don’t [express them], they end up getting tangled together inside. Then it’s really hard to sort through them."

Fiona claimed to have gotten some of the "balls of yarn" safely unwoven into something she can both deal with and comprehend. This includes her relationship with women.

Fiona Apple On Cheating With Taken Men

One of the "balls of yarn" that Fiona had to spend time unraveling was the one dealing with her own infidelity. AKA, being "the other woman".

"One thing I think I didn’t look at enough, when it comes to myself, is why I ever participated in a flirtation or even started a physical relationship with someone, when I knew they had a girlfriend," Fiona said to Vulture.

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"I think about it now, and both times I was privately in awe of the other woman — so was I trying to somehow put myself in the same category with her? Was I intimidated by them and I used the easiest avenue to assert my equal worth? Was I really asserting that I am only worth being a secret or that I believed deep down that it is somehow more exciting to be a secret? In both cases, I felt a boost in my ego at first. But I’ve never stopped being disgusted by the memories, and I wonder if that’s because I never apologized to the women. Maybe I tried to, but the women understandably made themselves unavailable to me. I am so sorry for my selfishness, but that’s not enough. I have to understand it, and I don’t yet."