sobriety repaired – Frankie Grande says sobriety became the turning point that repaired his relationship with sister Ariana Grande, helping them move past years when drinking and addiction pulled them apart during her teenage years.
NEW YORK — Eleven years ago, Frankie Grande stood backstage at Broadway Bares, terrified to go on. He was scheduled to perform at the annual striptease fundraiser, but addiction had taken control. He was “too high to go on,” he said in a recent conversation tied to his new memoir.
This year, he returned to the stage for the first time sober, twirling in a leather ribboned skirt and lace-up high-heel boots. “I love my life,” he captioned a video from the event.
Grande. who has spent years in the public eye as Broadway’s glittery party presence. writes in “Supergay!”—out now from Sourcebooks—that the brightness people associate with him never matched the reality of his darkest stretch. In his telling, he didn’t just lose control of nights out. He vanished from the kind of life he was supposed to be building with the people he loved most.
“There (was) a time where I just completely vanished into drugs and alcohol and had to pretend to be happy and big and bright and gay. And it was not who I was. I was really in a dark place,” he said.
He also described how, when he first got sober, the road wasn’t long on wisdom—just long on survival. He said that when he had 45 days clean, he went home and began writing the book. His agent pushed back, telling him he was “insane” and that he needed to wait.
“At six years sober is when I was like, ‘OK, I’m finally ready to start telling this tale,’” Grande said. “And it’s been three years (since then) and now it’s out in the world.”
He said the structure of the memoir reflects his identity as much as it reflects his pain. Grande pointed to tattoos dedicated to Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings. Star Wars. Star Trek. Sleeping Beauty. Phoenix. and Aliens—then connected that to how he sees himself: homosexual. alcoholic. addict. and a lifelong nerd.
“When I sat down to tell my story, a huge part of who I am as a person is homosexual, alcoholic, addict, nerd,” he said. “In order to make all those pieces come together, I just sat down and I was like, I don’t want to write a traditional memoir.”
He told readers he found authenticity through fantasy as a young queer kid, through escapism, comics, and superhero stories—because real life didn’t always feel safe enough to inhabit directly.
That same fight for acceptance threads into how he frames the message he wants LGBTQ+ young people to take from the book. Grande said the country is “deeply polarized once again” and pointed to how LGBTQ+ people. especially trans people. are being scapegoated and villainized. He wants kids to read “Supergay!” and feel permission to shine.
“I want kids to read this book and see if he can be sparkly out loud, proud and queer, maybe I can too and maybe it’ll be OK,” he said. “Maybe the state that I’m living in right now is not a safe place for me to do that, but I can be that in my heart.”
For Grande, the title is also a direct rebuttal to stigma. He said someone came to him at the stage door and suggested the memoir should have been called “Superhuman. ” and he replied that “that’s why it’s called ‘Supergay!’” Because. he added. there are still places where people hear the word “Supergay” and decide it’s wrong.
In his account, the stakes of sobriety aren’t only internal—they run straight through his family history, especially his relationship with Ariana Grande.
He said the siblings are “closer now than ever,” and that the closeness has grown as they’ve gotten older. But he also described the distance addiction created. He said they were always close—until “the drinking and the using pull us apart.”
He tied that gap to timing: he was 24 and Ariana was 14 when he disappeared, describing it as a “very tough time” for both of them.
“So again, no regrets, but it does hurt to talk about that,” he said. He described still feeling the sting of what he did, saying he sometimes thinks, “You’re a piece of s— for doing that.” Then he explained the shift he’s tried to build since.
“I have gotten sober and we’ve spoken about it, we’ve repaired our relationship and there is no more shame or guilt over that,” Grande said. “I have to give myself grace because I didn’t know better. I was caught in my disease.”
He called alcoholism and addiction a “mental health disease,” saying there’s no cure, only treatment—and that he didn’t know enough about that treatment early enough to fight effectively.
One moment, he said, forced the truth into focus.
Grande pointed to the bombing at Ariana’s show in Manchester. calling it “such a scary and dark time for my whole family.” He said he was on the other side of the world in New York while Ariana and the rest of the family were in Manchester. He described minutes of uncertainty when he feared they might be dead.
“In that period of time, the only thing that I could think to do was call my friend and say, ‘Get as much drugs as you possibly can get ahold of.’ That was my only coping mechanism for that level of fear and sadness was drugs,” he said. “And that didn’t wake me up. That wasn’t the wake-up call.”
He said he used drugs that night, then flew to be with his family. During a planning session afterward, he described being so intoxicated he couldn’t help—then realized he needed help for real.
“In that moment, I realized I’d need help,” he said.
He said the push toward rehab came quickly from Ariana. “Immediately, I said, ‘I need help.’ She said, ‘I have just the place,’” Grande said.
He also described how his mother’s view of his recovery changed after he shared his memoir with her. He said he owed a lot to Ariana for his recovery, and that after the book, his mother “has really come around” and wants to be an active part of it.
He said he handed her the book and asked her to read it like a conversation she didn’t yet know how to have. “I handed her the book and I was like, ‘Have fun. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that you don’t know and it’s hopefully going to lead to some really challenging conversations.’ And it did.”.
Grande said giving his mother the book felt terrifying—while Ariana was “not so terrified.” He didn’t elaborate on details, but the tension in his words made clear what sobriety had to carry: the risk of telling the truth to people who deserved better.
For him, the result is the kind of repair that doesn’t erase the past. It reframes it.
He said that when 45-days-sober Frankie looked back, he believed the world was “conspiring against me,” but now he thinks “the universe is conspiring in my favor, even the bad things.” He said that includes the relationships he destroyed and later worked to rebuild—with his mother and sister.
“I’m so grateful my husband (Hale Leon Grande) never saw me drunk or high because I would’ve destroyed that relationship as well,” he said. “The fact that we’re here and everything has been repaired and is beautiful and wonderful, I wouldn’t change any of that.”
Grande said he would not accept a “magic spell” that removed the hardship that shaped him, even if it promised an easier life.
“If there was a magic spell that was like, ‘I will take away all that difficulty in your life and you would’ve had none of it,’ I would not accept that spell,” he said. “Because I needed to have those trials and tribulations to grow from.”
Frankie Grande Ariana Grande sobriety addiction recovery Supergay! Broadway Bares books LGBTQ+ acceptance memoir