This is a story about an entertainer named R. Kelly. It is a story about the remarkable, but also very strange, pop talent he has. It is a story about the difficult places he came from and the ways they may, or may not, have shaped who he has become. It is also the story of a man who has been publicly accused of multiple sexual offenses with underage women, and who stood trial for making child pornography. He was eventually acquitted of that charge, and his career has continued uninterrupted, but for the most part he has evaded even the most basic questions that might help people understand what is true about him.

For this story, R. Kelly agreed to speak about his whole life without restrictions. We met three times over three days in his hometown of Chicago. The second and third meetings were at his favorite cigar bar. The first meeting was on the ninety-ninth floor of the Sears Tower.

When Robert Kelly was 3 years old, growing up poor with a single mother on Chicago's South Side, construction started on a building a few miles away in the center of town. It was to be called the Sears Tower, and for nearly 25 years it would be the tallest building in the world. The tower—which was actually renamed the Willis Tower in 2009, though many Chicagoans, including Kelly, still refer to it by its original name—would also come to play a complicated role in the psychic geography of the 48-year-old man sitting up here now, looking down upon the city and to Lake Michigan beyond.

When Kelly was about 9, he and two friends rode their bicycles in from their neighborhood, and when they arrived, they challenged one another to stand next to this tower. “A lot of kids were scared to do it because it actually felt like it was moving and falling over,” he remembers. Also, Kelly's elder brother had told them that if they got too close, it really would fall on them. The way he remembers it, his friends chickened out, but not him. “I actually did it,” he says. “I put my hands up to the Sears Tower and I stood up and looked dead at it. I stood there for a long time. That's why I wanted to do this interview here.”

And what did you think when you looked up at it?

“I said, ‘I'm coming for you.’ ”

What did you mean?

“The top of it. The height, the massiveness. You know, the strength that it carries. I remember wanting that, somehow.”

In what way?

“In my life, I wanted to feel tall. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be tall as the Sears Tower. I wanted to be on top of the Sears Tower. I wanted to be as strong as the Sears Tower feels. When my mom would be on the highway, I would always look at the Sears Tower as: That's where I want to go, that's where I want to be.”

For many years now, most interviews with R. Kelly have been brief, and restrictions have often been imposed, fences rung around the subjects he wouldn't discuss. Not today. As yet, I'm not really sure why he's changed his mind. The simplest reason, of course, would be that he's innocent of anything he has ever been accused of—in that case the mystery would be why he has sidestepped real conversations for so long. (Though of course, not everyone who chooses to be silent is hiding something.) Maybe, whatever the reason for his reticence, he has come to realize that it is doing him more harm than good. Maybe his times of trouble seem so far behind him that he can't see any way they can hurt him now. Maybe he's just convinced that R. Kelly can ride through any challenge. Maybe he's confident that he has a good answer for any question he'll face, or maybe he doesn't yet realize the kinds of questions that he will be facing. Maybe he hasn't thought it through at all.

There's a common way that journalists often choose to approach encounters like this. Ask all the easy stuff first. Get on the subject's good side, get their confidence. Leave the tricky stuff until late in the last interview, when everything else is safely asked and answered, and then grab what you can.

That's not how I'm doing this. First, if he isn't prepared to engage in some kind of serious discussion on the more difficult parts of his life, then I can't see how there can be a significant article about R. Kelly in 2016 that is worth printing. Second, it would make me feel spineless and undignified. I've read, listened to, and watched every other R. Kelly interview I could find, and too often what happens is that if interviewers mention anything at all, what they do is make a perfunctory little raid on the subject, touching it just to say they did. Why play around? He knows, at least to some degree, what's coming. He's a grown man, 48 years old. He's stood on a thousand stages and sat through a criminal trial. I know it's not going to be a comfortable conversation, but surely the most respectful way to have it is to get on and have it.

So, walking in here, that is my plan.

The ninety-ninth floor appears to be completely bare. In the huge rectangular room where we meet, there are only two places to sit. One is on some sofas over in the far corner. Kelly chooses the other option. And so we sit facing each other, at a small round table set in the middle of the large empty space on the lakeward side of the tower, glass on three sides of us. It looks like a surreal over-the-top set for an interrogation scene in an action movie. Before we begin, Kelly tries to prop up his phone on the table between us, to record the conversation—I am as well—but it keeps sliding and falling over. First of all, before anything else, I want to talk with him about his childhood, and in particular some tough aspects of it that seem central to whom he has become. For one thing, his inability to read.

“Other kids could read, other kids could write, other kids could spell, they could do math,” he says. “I felt like an alien, I felt like an outcast. I felt like, ‘What is going to happen to me?’ My mother couldn't answer it. My stepfather wasn't really interested in it one way or another. And my brothers and sisters were so young at the time they wouldn't do nothing but tease me about it. I was the ‘dummy’: ‘How you gon’ do this? You can't even read!' ”

He says it's not like he didn't try, and he describes what would happen when he did: “I would always hear scrambled music, like an orchestra going off that didn't know what they was doing. It was so confusing. It was, like, violin's playing ‘I Believe I Can Fly,’ the bass is playing ‘When a Woman's Fed Up,’ the guitar's playing ‘Bump N' Grind,’ the piano's playing a gospel song. And then I would end up getting really sleepy and tired.”

Reading remains a struggle. “Since my daughter showed me voice texts on my phone, I've gotten a lot better,” he says. “I'm not a A student, I'm not even a B student, but I've gotten a lot better with the reading because of texts. And I can voice-text and say whatever I want to people. And then they text me back and I take my time and I can read through it.”

R. Kelly Sings the Story of His Life, the Abridged Version

Early on, Kelly faced other challenges. He grew up without a father, gone before Kelly was born, and his mother wouldn't talk about him. “That's the one thing,” he says to me. “If I could change anything, I would definitely have had a father around. My father. I would definitely say it affected me deeply as a young man, coming up. Who doesn't want a father? Those are the beginnings, and those are what can dictate the roads you choose in life, and choosing them well. And it affected me.”

Kelly had a deep, close relationship with his mother, but he says even she never knew everything that was going on in her young son's turbulent life. He says that until he mentioned it in his 2012 memoir, Soulacoaster, he had never told anyone at all about the sexual abuse that he experienced. (Not even his ex-wife Andrea? “Absolutely not.”) It was something he “put so far in the back of my mind that I even forgot about it.” This wasn't the history he wanted for the person he was becoming: “As I got older, the more I just didn't want it to be in my past. The more I became successful.” He was determined that the R. Kelly the world would know—the one who would sell more than 30 million albums, have 36 Billboard Hot 100 hits, invent his own strange musical language, write hits for countless others, and conceive one of the weirdest syntheses of video and music of all time, Trapped in the Closet—would be someone else. “I didn't want that to be something that was in my luggage once I got to my success home, so to speak.”

In the book, he describes a number of premature sexual experiences, including an approach by a trusted family friend, a man, who he says tried to persuade Kelly to masturbate him for money, which Kelly says he rebuffed. “It was a crazy weird experience,” he tells me. “But not a full-blown experience, because it didn't go down. Contact sexual—no. A visual—absolutely. A visual from him showing me his penis and all that stuff.” But he describes in his memoir how the full-on sexual abuse that lasted for several years (it was oral sex the first time, though he tells me it soon became intercourse) started one day when Kelly fell asleep in front of the TV and was awoken from “a crazy dream about Three's Company” to find a woman playing with him: