Miley Cyrus's latest comments about her father Billy Ray Cyrus couldn't come at a worse time. The singer recently put her father on blast as he deals with what may turn out to be a messy divorce. Billy Ray recently separated from singer Firerose after less than a year of marriage.
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Miley's comments probably predate the split, but they're surfacing at the worst time. David Letterman interviewed Cyrus about her parents and time on Hannah Montana. She said that she inherited a lot of bad qualities from her dad.
"I have a terrible memory, because I also inherited the narcissism from my father that I don't know anything about my siblings except for the part that I was doing," she said. "It's true. It's OK." She said that she and Billy Ray don't really get along. She never really viewed her father as her hero.
"I mean, honestly, my mom is my hero. And, uh, my father," she started, "I'm grateful for — first his genes. My dad has great hair, and I got that. But he also — he has a relationship and a foot on the ground to like 'the real' and to nature. And he always did, even when he was super famous. I'm grateful for being able to watch him ahead of me."
So there were things that Miley was grateful for. She said that Billy Ray had a really rough childhood and grew up in poverty. She said he made sure that she never had to experience that.
Miley Cyrus Talks Father
"He's almost like, given me this map, and there is a map of what to do and what not to do... He's guided me on both. And I do think — him and I — we have really different upbringings. The way that my dad was raised, he grew up very poor in a very small town. His parents were divorced when he was very young. My dad had a pretty rough childhood, and my childhood... I had food — I had love — I grew up in a beautiful big house, and my dad didn't have that," she explained.
"And so I have a lot of empathy and compassion for his childhood, which obviously developed to create the man he is now, that I have a lot of love for," she said.
However, Cyrus obviously feels a bit conflicted about her father. She is thankful for the fact that he helped to give her creativity, but it sounds like things are still strained.
"They can't be weighed on the same scale, actually," Cyrus said. "Without my dad, I know, I mean not just literally, I wouldn't be sitting in this chair. I wouldn't exist, but I would not, who I am as a person, it wouldn't exist because my dad as a creative and like as an artist in the way that his brain works has always made me feel safer in my own mind because we're very similar in some of our ideas."
