Early on in Mariah Carey’s affecting new memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” she tells a story about being three years old, shaking in terror after twelve police officers stormed into her cramped home in Long Island to “manage” an altercation between her father and her brother. “I didn’t know if they had come to save us or kill us,” Carey writes. “It was Long Island in the 1970s, and two Black males were being violent—the appearance of the police almost never meant that help had arrived.” In the aftermath, young Mariah’s great aunt, Nana Reese, a “prophetess” who serves as a pastor at an African Methodist Pentecostal church in Harlem, comforts Carey with a vague yet potent prediction. “Don’t be scared of all the trouble you see,” she says. “All your dreams and visions are going to happen for you.” Carey’s survival depends on such cues, what some religious people might call “signs and wonders,” which can be tucked away and worked over like worry stones. She has little else but her faith.
Carey’s memoir, which was co-written with the the writer and activist Michaela Angela Davis, is an incisive, entertaining, and impressively well-written account of her road from poverty and obscurity to superstardom. But its first half is a nearly unrelenting catalogue of cruelty, betrayal, and deprivation. In the opening sections, Carey, whose parents divorced before she turned four, lives in fear of her volatile older brother and sister and pretty much everyone else. A fair child with “blondish” curly hair, she does not resemble her Black father, her darker siblings, or her straight-haired Irish mother: “I felt like a stranger among them all, an intruder in my own family,” she writes. Her childhood is marked by constant moves, mainly between various parts of Long Island, where she lives with her mother; she stays with her father in Brooklyn Heights on Sundays, and she occasionally visits her paternal relatives, who live in Harlem. “Both my parents worked very hard so we could live in neighborhoods where we could glimpse that elusive ‘better life’ and feel ‘safe,’ ” she writes, although this aspiration generally lands her in white areas where she is ostracized and traumatized. When she is in eighth grade, a group of her wealthy white “friends” invite her to a sleepover in Southampton only to trap her in a room and scream the N-word at her. Another time, Carey is talking on the phone with her father and tries to pass the call to her sister, who doesn’t want him to know where she is; her sister lashes out by throwing a cup of hot tea on Carey, producing third-degree burns on her back. One day, some aunts on her father’s side attempt to stage an “intervention” regarding her often neglected hair. By now, the reader knows better than to expect a happy outcome, but Carey is thrilled at the prospect of her transformation. The hot comb turns out to be too strong for Carey’s hair and scorches it, and the women call off their mission.
There are some bright spots in these early years, most of which involve music. Jam sessions at her mother’s home (which Carey calls a “shack”) are rare sources of joy and connection—both with her mother, a Juilliard-trained opera singer, and with other musicians, with whom Carey experiences a familial bond. “Live music was the best thing about living with my mother,” she states. “I was surrounded by the love of music, but even more importantly, by the love of musicianship—the love of the craft, the love of the process.” Visits with her father’s relatives in Harlem produce a similarly rare belonging: even when the neighborhood kids insist she must be white, her cousins claim her as kin. The only thing stronger than Carey’s desire to be claimed is her drive to succeed in music. As a teen-ager, she travels from Long Island into Manhattan for weeknight recording sessions only to collapse in her bed at home for a few hours before another day of high school. She has no backup plan, no safety net: “Music was the only plan, ever.”
In 1988, at the age of eighteen, she attended an industry party where she met Tommy Mottola, who was then the president of Sony Music. He listened to one of her demos and immediately signed her to the label. The two married in 1993. It is well known that Mottola, who is twenty years Carey’s senior, was possessive and controlling. But the extent to which he monitored his young wife’s movements is chilling. Carey tells of trying to slip out of bed at night after he falls asleep, to get a snack downstairs or to write some lyrics or enjoy a moment to herself in the Westchester mansion she calls “Sing Sing,” only to be shocked by the invisible fence of his voice through the intercom: “Watcha doin’?” Carey’s tale of escaping her marriage via couple’s therapy and an affair with Derek Jeter is riveting, as is her account of her descent into and emergence from a later emotional and spiritual breakdown: “There is nothing more powerful than surviving a trip to hell and coming home covered in the light of restoration,” she writes.
But the book’s greatest revelations are her descriptions of her own and others’ artistry. She is a dedicated student of performance, composition, and that more elusive thing, “trends.” Of her early years, Carey writes, “I spent hours writing, enriching my ear, and studying popular music trends on the radio.” She is an unapologetic devotee of hip-hop (a genre considered too “urban”—the nineties code word for “Black”—for an artist whose first hits were shoehorned into the “adult contemporary” format). She is most at home in the studio, where she sees the act of making records as a “kind of a spiritual science.” She adores great singers, from little known backup vocalists to American pop royalty. “Aretha Franklin is my high bar and North Star,” she writes, “a masterful musician and mind-bogglingly gifted singer who wouldn’t let one genre confine or define her. I listened to and learned from all of her.”
“I still believe most people don’t understand how amazing she was as a pianist and arranger,” she continues. “I think if you are a woman, with an incredible voice, your musicianship always gets underplayed.” The observation clearly applies to Carey herself: her artistry was often undermined by the assumption that it was Mottola who had “made her a star.” Even as she counters that myth by describing her own hard work, her translation of that work into song and songwriting—and into a career yielding more No. 1 singles than any other solo artist—remains elusive.
So, too, does the strain that must have attended some aspects of her work. There is no discord to be found in her accounts of working with other musicians—no fight over royalties or control or credit, no hint of competition. Instead, Carey keeps her musical relationships (with artists such as Jermaine Dupri, Da Brat, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Prince, and many others) in a sacred space apart from the drama that defines her familial and social life. She makes a similar effort to preserve her relationship with her fans. She does not lament the need to perform for them constantly at the peak of her career, or recount any scary brushes with obsessed followers. Rather, Carey’s professional and personal resentments are reserved for the media, which feeds on her vulnerability and mishaps; her labels, such as Virgin Records, which push her beyond exhaustion; and her family (particularly, her mother and “ex-brother”), who try to drain her of money and check her into strange institutions instead of helping her rest. Her highest praise is lavished on her twin children, on her fellow-musicians, and on her “family of fans,” who are known as the “lambs.”
It makes sense that a woman whose childhood was scarred by the pain of not belonging would come to revere her wholly accepting fellow-musicians and her fans. What is harder to parse is how precisely the pain and abjection that Carey describes in such detail yielded her confidence, determination, and skill. How, aside from her mother’s assistance with vocal technique and jam sessions, did Carey become such an extraordinary artist? How did a child with such a vexed relationship to her own appearance come to believe she was meant for the spotlight? These questions go largely unanswered.
This is not a flaw of the text, nor is it atypical: musicians’ memoirs commonly register a disconnect between the story of the artist’s life and the creation of the music that makes such a life a point of interest in the first place. But Carey’s memoir reflects this disjuncture on the level of its form. The text is punctuated by blocks of italicized lyrics from songs Carey wrote and recorded. Sometimes the lyrics serve as epigraphs to chapters (perhaps in a pop-culture nod to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic, “The Souls of Black Folk”). Sometimes they are juxtaposed with a relevant story from Carey’s life—after describing her experience as a starving artist in New York, she presents relevant lines from “Make It Happen”: “Without a penny to my name / So very young and so afraid / No proper shoes upon my feet / Sometimes I couldn’t even eat . . . ” Then, too, she occasionally integrates the lyrics into her story in a way that one might, thinking in cinematic terms, call diegetic: Carey writes a song, or someone records a verse, and she gives us the words to it. In staging such varied relationships between her narrative and her songs, the text implies there is no strict or consistent correlation between them. The way life begets song—and vice versa—is less calculus than alchemy. Or, to use Carey’s own phrase, it is a “spiritual science.”
Her book is called “The Meaning of Mariah Carey”—a close cousin to but different from another possible title: “The Making of Mariah Carey.” This isn’t a story of self-making so much as it is an account of the suffering of “Little Mariah” and a demonstration of the nebulous relationship between past and present, life and song. In the last section, titled “Emancipation,” Carey narrates a night of revelry, after which she and the rapper Cam’ron drive a purple Lamborghini from downtown Manhattan up to a “dignified and decaying” brownstone on 131st Street in Harlem. The building once housed Nana Reese’s storefront church; it was also the place where Carey’s mother and father were married. Nana Reese had come to New York with her children from Wilmington, North Carolina, not long after an encounter (about which Carey divulges nothing) with a white policeman and a fire chief. Reese was accompanied by her sister, Addie, who would later give birth to Carey’s father, Roy. Carey poses for a picture in front of the brownstone, in an homage to a photo of Nana Reese taken there, “just before climbing back into the passenger seat of a car that cost more money than [Reese and Addie] ever made in their entire lifetimes.” “My women elders,” she continues, “who made something from nothing. They had a vision beyond Jim Crow. . . . beyond fear. I wonder if they ever had a vision of what was in store for their little Roy’s baby girl?”
We know that Reese did, because Carey has told us, early on, about her prophecy. But, to Carey’s credit, she doesn’t try too hard to make the scene add up—to make her Black women forebears the backdrop to her story, or her own life the fulfillment of their labor and belief. Rather than superimpose her image over theirs or draw a straight line from their daring to her own, she simply implies that two Black women of faith helped bring into being another such woman, one whose love of ritual and history has driven her up to this old landmark. How exactly she has arrived, in the space of two generations, so far from where they started, is an open question. Carey’s music, likewise, develops, mysteriously though not mystically, from an early life that offered little to predict it.
The same might be said, finally, of the book’s back-cover image. There, a young Carey stands on a beach, her eyes narrowed in the sunlight. In the book, she recounts a car ride to the beach one day when she is seven, during which one of her brother’s friends unexpectedly combs her hair into soft, untangled curls. She is delighted. The photograph on the back of the book appears to be from that day; perhaps she asked someone to take the picture to memorialize it. But she lets the reader make that connection herself. Whatever the case, whatever the backstory, her hair looks beautiful.
