Who is Ryan Holding?
You already know the answer to that question. Most readers on this earth will be familiar with such a famous name, and while I hesitate to overestimate how widely this book might be published, Ryan herself has topped the charts in upward of seventeen countries.
If one were to conduct the briefest Google search, they would be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information and opinions on this pop star, even discounting the flood of investigative material of recent years that covers her disappearance.
And much of that investigation concerns her final music video, set to the single “Hear Me Now.”
For the uninitiated, Ryan’s video was primarily shot in the historic State Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, one of the surviving movie palaces built in the 1920s. It opens on Ryan alone on the ornate stage in a simple blue dress, with her banjo, under a massive papier-mâché model of an old oak tree. There is a small table next to her that holds a glowing crystal ball.
Ryan begins to sing:Just a whisper in the night / That’s how all of this went down / People say I chose my path / It was the other way around.
She reaches the end of the first verse, and the music swells as her band joins her, silhouetted and backlit behind her on the stage. At the same time, the movie screen above them flickers to life and begins to play old footage of Ryan’s shows and media appearances. The two scenes continue to play out concurrently and, at first, parallel each other: Ryan performs at a bluegrass festival on-screen while below, she mirrors her own movements and wears the same silver minidress and cowgirl boots as she sings. The band behind her grows closer and increases in number as other people crowd the stage, just out of the light; and then, as footage of Ryan’s first arena show plays and Ryan singsAnd you wanted me for your own, the arms of the crowd reach out and yank her into the darkness as blue strobes flicker.
The lights rise again, and the stage is lushly decorated: marquee lights and chintz furniture, the band fully lit and dressed in old Hollywood style with Ryan looking like a femme fatale in a dark-red sequined dress at the center, hand on an old-fashioned microphone. Concert footage continues to play above her, along with clips caught by paparazzi of her dates with famous men.
And I wanted you for my own,she sings.
As the song plays, it can be seen that Ryan is gradually rising above the stage on a platform, and the camera cuts to the back of the theater, where water has begun to trickle down the aisle. A group of women, dressed to the hilt, gather below Ryan’s platform and sneer at her. The water rises. Soon it’s lapping around the red velvet seats in the audience, and objects can be seen floating in its churn: an old flannel shirt, a red Solo cup, a toy boat with the nameAngelineon its side.
A young man appears near the bottom of the platform and reaches out his hand. Ryan takes it to bring him up with her, but instead he yanks her hard and nearly pulls her off. The screen above briefly shows Ryan being interviewed outside a hotel in the rain, and the blue strobes flash even brighter than last time. Water begins to flood from the balcony, from the box seats. Another sneering woman in a bright-orange dress stands in front of the box’s drenched velvet curtains and pours buckets of water over the railing.
Onstage, Ryan is now in a long black gown with an ornate lace cape, silvery white, as the water laps at the platform. She begins the bridge—I’ve been here singing my heart out / Can you hear me now? / Will you hear me now?—and the deluge engulfs her at last, lifting herself and her band off their feet and into the depths.
The singing becomes muffled and distorted as Ryan tangles in her heavy clothes and instruments float around her: a fiddle, a banjo, a set of drums. The cape is caught on an electric guitar, and Ryan is able to yank free as the chorus returns loud and clear. She reaches out to grasp the crystal ball and clutches it close to her chest before kicking hard and swimming upward.
In the ornate ceiling, she locates a hatch and pushes against it, swinging it open as the music swells and abruptly stops as Ryan climbs out into an empty field in rural Massachusetts alone, now back in the light-blue dress. The crystal ball rolls to the side as the camera slowly pans away, silent but for the distant sound of wind and birdsong.
Obsessed as it is with her, the world can’t seem to make up its mind about Ryan Holding. She’s an American sweetheart. She’s a sex symbol. A prude. A slut. She’s single-handedly destroying the climate. She’s the most involved human rights activist we’ve ever seen in Hollywood. She’s authentic, just like us. She’s a Chinese psyop. She’s immortal and looks suspiciously like that satanic cult leader from the ’70s. She’s gay. She’s Republican. She’s the epitome of white feminism. She receives unfair, disproportionate criticism because she’s a woman who makes music for women, and everyone secretly hates and envies her for her unfathomable global success.
But let’s start at the beginning, before Ryan was any of that.
When her story began, she was an ambitious young girl growing up in the idyllic suburbs of Hamilton, Massachusetts.
I visited the town in the fall of 2019 when I began my interviews for this book and found it hard to believe—but fitting, maybe—that someone as prolific as Ryan would come from such a tucked-away place with hardly a Main Street to its name. No more than twenty minutes outside Salem and twice that from Boston, Hamilton has a cozy population of seventy-five hundred and owes its fame to Ryan. Its residents live on forested back roads and must travel to nearby Wenham for any restaurants or shopping.
It was here in this woodland that Ryan was raised by her schoolteacher mother, Barbara, and banker father, John, who sadly passed away from cardiac arrest shortly after Ryan’s disappearance.
Her mother, now living in a very exclusive retirement community in South Carolina, is almost impossible to reach. In the single instance that she deigned to take my call after the many messages I’d left for her with the tight-lipped front desk, Barbara had shared only a few short words: “Leave my daughter alone. Do you hear me? I have nothing else to say to you people.”
“Do you know where she is?” I’d pressed. “People care about her. They just want to be sure that she’s safe.”
“You think so? You’d be wrong,” Barbara said. “They don’t give a shit about her.”
And she hung up on me.
I didn’t exactly disagree with her. A lot of people—millions, in fact—might genuinely claim to care about Ryan’s well-being. And they may truly believe they’re being sincere. But would that still be the case if she’dchosento step away from the spotlight?
The line I fed Barbara was just another iteration of the phrase that had been thrown around many times across the internet:The fans have a right to know.People feel personally responsible for Ryan’s rise to fame. No artist would ever be successful without the audience that celebrates them, shows up to their concerts, buys and listens to their records in order to put them at the top of the charts time and time again. It’s a working relationship—akin to ghosting your job without notice.
But it’s also a parasocial one. A career in which your entire life is on display.
I’m a private person myself, and my line of work suits me. I get to put others in the limelight while generally staying out of it. I’ve seen time and again how celebrities become products, human commodities. And although it’s my hope that Ryan disappeared willingly, I’ve also developed a greater understanding of the sheer amounts of money that change hands when you live in that stratum of wealth. It gives the illusion that you’re protected, impenetrable. But look at the cases of Selena, of Brad Pitt’s assault on the red carpet, of Kim Kardashian’s Paris robbery at gunpoint. And while those attacks were perpetrated by people lower in prestige than their victims, we hear even less about the crimes of megamillionaires and billionaires. Money is an excellent tool for keeping things quiet.
Ryan may have been the richest female musician to date. But there are other fish bigger than she is, and they’re powerful enough to make anyone disappear.
Out of everyone I interviewed in Hamilton, the person with whom I wanted to speak most was almost as difficult to reach as Barbara Holding had been. Her name is well known to any Ryde-or-Die, who must often wish to be in her place: Mari Stevens, Ryan’s oldest and closest friend.
She’d dodged my messages across several different platforms, finally sending the brief DM “You have to fucking stop” before blocking me entirely.
