The Marie Claire interview from 2012, conducted by Allison Glock, is the most substantive of the documented sources for her biography. Glock is a writer with a particular skill for the kind of interview that draws its subject into specificity without forcing the specificity into a predetermined narrative. The quotes from that interview — “I was never lied to, and I was loved”; “I couldn’t relate to kid stuff”; “I was worried we didn’t have gas money or food”; “I consider myself lucky” — have the quality of things said once and accurately rather than of things polished through repetition into a set piece.
The Porter interview from 2018 is the most substantive of the sources for her reflection on the Gossip Girl years. The observation that she “had to figure it out quickly and with not a completely developed mind to discern between what’s real and what’s not” is the kind of retrospective assessment that requires enough distance from the experience to evaluate it clearly. The distance she had, in 2018, was the distance of someone who was by then a wife and a mother and who had been out of the Gossip Girl years long enough to look at them with something resembling equanimity.
The Vice interview from 2014, on the music, is the source that catches her in a moment of something like defiance — not aggression, but a clear resistance to the framing that her music should be evaluated in terms of her television career, or that her pop singles should be taken as representative of what she was actually interested in doing musically. “I’m not that pop person and I don’t know that I ever was” is a statement that doesn’t apologize for the pop singles while being entirely clear that they were not the authentic musical statement.