The financial structure of this period of her life was clear in what she told Marie Claire in 2012: “I was worried we didn’t have gas money or food. Those were my concerns.” This is not the concern of a child who is developing normally in a stable middle-class household. It is the concern of a child who is aware, in a way that children are not supposed to be aware, of the economic fragility of the household she lives in. She supplemented the family’s income through modeling; her grandfather’s modest checks were also part of the income structure; her mother was managing life in New York after a period that had included federal incarceration.
She has also said — and the consistency of this across interviews is notable — that working seemed normal to her, that she couldn’t relate to the concerns that occupied most of her contemporaries, and that the gap she felt between herself and kids her age was a function of her concerns being more urgent and more concrete. “I couldn’t relate to kid stuff,” she told Marie Claire. “‘Jimmy doesn’t like me!’ Who cares? I was worried we didn’t have gas money or food.”
This kind of accelerated pragmatism is a feature of the biographies of people who are required to function as economic agents well before adolescence. It is not romanticized in her telling; it is presented as a simple fact about what her childhood was actually like. She did not feel extraordinary. She felt that her concerns were the concerns she had.