madonna_100413.jpgTerry Richardson/Harper’s Bazaar

Madonna really is telling all -- in her own words. For the November issue of Harper's Bazaar, the 55-year penned a candid essay chronicling some very personal and traumatic events in her life including the controversy surrounding her 2006 adoption of son David from Malawi, her "strange" teen years and being raped at knifepoint.

madonna_230_100413.jpgOn adopting her son David:

    “This was an eye-opening experience. A real low point in my life. I could get my head around people giving me a hard time for simulating masturbation onstage or publishing my Sex book, even kissing Britney Spears at an awards show, but trying to save a child’s life was not something I thought I would be punished for. Friends tried to cheer me up by telling me to think of it all as labor pains that we all have to go through when we give birth. This was vaguely comforting. In any case, I got through it. I survived.”




On being the victim of rape shortly after moving to New York in 1978:


    "New York wasn't everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms. The first year, I was held up at gunpoint. Raped on the roof of a building I was dragged up to with a knife in my back."



On arriving in New York with dreams of stardom:

    "[It] wasn't anything I prepared for … Trying to be a professional dancer, paying my rent by posing nude for art classes, staring at people staring at me naked. Daring them to think of me as anything but a form they were trying to capture with their pencils and charcoal. … I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going."


On her "strange" teenage years:

    “Most people thought I was strange. I didn’t have many friends; I might not have had any friends. But it all turned out good in the end, because when you aren’t popular and you don’t have a social life, it gives you more time to focus on your future. And for me, that was going to New York to become a REAL artist. To be able to express myself in a city of nonconformists. To revel and shimmy and shake in a world and be surrounded by daring people.”


Those are some intense revelations, but way to express yourself Material Girl!