Ariana Grande Reveals She Was ‘So Drunk’ and ‘So Sad’ After Mac Miller’s Death

Mac Miller passed away in September 2018, and Ariana Grande opened up about the rapper’s passing for one of the first times in a new interview with Vogue, sharing that she can barely recall the aftermath of her ex-boyfriend’s death.

“My friends know how much solace music brings me, so I think it was an all-around, let’s-get-her-there type situation,” she told the publication of heading to the recording studio in the wake of Miller’s accidental overdose. “If I’m completely honest, I don’t remember those months of my life because I was (a) so drunk and (b) so sad.”

During that period, Grande wrote and recorded her most recent album, Thank U Next, which earned her the most chart success of her career and addressed the turbulence of Grande’s past few years.

“I don’t really remember how it started or how it finished, or how all of a sudden there were 10 songs on the board,” the 26-year-old said of the project. “I think that this is the first album and also the first year of my life where I’m realizing that I can no longer put off spending time with myself, just as me. I’ve been boo’d up my entire adult life. I’ve always had someone to say goodnight to. So Thank U, Next was this moment of self-realization. It was this scary moment of ‘Wow, you have to face all this stuff now. No more distractions. You have to heal all this s—.’”

Grande and Miller dated for around two years, announcing their split in April 2018.

“It’s pretty all-consuming,” Grande said of her grief over Miller’s death. “By no means was what we had perfect, but, like, f—. He was the best person ever, and he didn’t deserve the demons he had. I was the glue for such a long time, and I found myself becoming . . . less and less sticky. The pieces just started to float away.”

In May, she clapped back to one of Miller’s fans after they tweeted that Miller’s arrest for drunk driving was caused by his breakup with Grande, telling Vogue that most people had no idea what was going on behind the scenes of their relationship.

“People don’t see any of the real stuff that happens, so they are loud about what they think happened,” she said. “They didn’t see the years of work and fighting and trying, or the love and exhaustion. That tweet came from a place of complete defeat, and you have no idea how many times I warned him that that would happen and fought that fight, for how many years of our friendship, of our relationship. You have no idea so you’re not allowed to pull that card, because you don’t fucking know. That’s where that came from.”

Photo Credit: Getty / Jeff Kravitz