Pitchfork: How has being sick affected your creative identity?

KH: Creating now is really the therapy of working through the feelings of this illness, and all of the different things it implies—being a woman and having a male caregiver, and watching so many people say, “Oh, he's the best husband in the world, he's so great, he totally took care of you!” Of course I love my husband [Adam Horovitz] and I thank him every day for what he's done for me, but if the situation was reversed, everybody would assume that I would be his caregiver and help him out. When a man does it he gets a parade, but when a woman does it, it's par for the course. That's been an interesting thing to watch. Nobody's really commenting on my suffering, they're all commenting on what a great person my husband is. And it pisses him off too!

Pitchfork: Do you think it’s changed how people respond to you?

KH: No, not at all. The one difference has been so many people on Facebook or Twitter being like, “Hey, I'm rooting for you.” And people who have Lyme and other invisible illnesses writing me a lot of letters and emails, giving me advice but also asking for advice. Otherwise, the thing that's weird is that people don't understand how long this illness stretches out for: I'm still gonna be dealing with the fallout for at least the next year, even though I'm gonna be able to tour and be functional and I'm fine. People still ask me for so much, constantly. And even when it was publicized that I had canceled all these shows and was sick, I was still getting tons of requests. You'd think people would be like, “You know what? That person's really sick and they're going through this hard time, I'm not gonna ask them to blurb my book right now,” you know what I mean?

Pitchfork: Like the assumption is that the woman is the caregiver, and you’ll still be able to do these things for people.

KH: Exactly! It's constant unpaid labor. So I made postcards and paid someone to come over and address them all—like, “I'm not well, I can't return your letters right now.” And I tried to come up with strategies for being a little bit less accessible. [The illness] has changed me—I've always thought “life is short and I wanna make as much of it as I can,” but I really don't have time to mess around. This has really been a wake-up call in terms of what's important, and I'm working hard to figure that out. I need to get better at not doing favors for people all the time. It's hard because there's so many people who have helped me get to the point where I'm in a band that people wanna come see, or where people pay money to see me lecture.