The song of her heart

It's been 30 years since Mariah Carey released her debut album and stunned audiences with her seemingly ever-accessible whistle register.

Over the years, she has alluded to a painful past, but no thinly veiled song reference or shadetinged interview has painted a full picture of Carey, one of the most prolific and bestselling pop stars of our time.

The singer's new memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, fills in the gaps and reminds us of all that Carey has overcome, largely on her own, and well ahead of our cultural reckoning on racism and gender inequality.

Here are some things we learn from her memoir:

1 She has strong Lambily values.

In one of her shrewdest insights, Carey (who wrote alongside Michaela Angela

Davis) notes that she was one of the first artists to cultivate an ongoing relationship with her fans, and give them a name — the Lambily — laying the groundwork for the Swifties, Beliebers and Little Monsters to come.

2 Her childhood was far from glam.

“I was always so scared as a little girl, and music was my escape,” Carey writes in an early chapter. “My house was heavy, weighed down with yelling and chaos. When I sang in a whispery tone, it calmed me down.”

Singing liberated Carey from a childhood marred by violence and neglect. She writes of fights between her father and brother that were so extreme, the police had to be called; her sister throwing a mug of scalding tea at her; and her mother leaving her home alone when she was just six years old. But she also gives her mother, Patricia Carey, a Juilliard-trained opera singer, credit for encouraging her vocal talent and surrounding her with accomplished musicians.

Estranged from her siblings, Carey did make peace with her father before he died in 2002. But her relationship with her mother, who she calls Pat, is complicated. “I have reserved some room in my heart and life to hold her — but with boundaries,” she writes.

3 She struggled to style her hair.

In her book, Carey devotes a chapter to largely painful memories associated with her curly, multi-textured hair, which she says her mother never bothered to figure out. “Having one Black and one white parent is complicated, but when you are a little girl with a white mother, largely cut off from other Black women and girls, it can be excruciatingly lonely,” Carey writes.

4 Racist peers bullied her.

Carey is clear that the discrimination she faced was rooted in racism. She writes of being invited to a popular girl's house only to have the girl and her friends cruelly hurl the N-word at her. A star turn as Hodel in a camp production of Fiddler on the Roof was overshadowed by horrified stares from her peers and their parents when her father approached the stage to give her flowers: “They were staring because my father was the only Black man in sight, and I belonged to him.”

5 Mimi was more than an album.

After years of very public ups and downs, Carey released The Emancipation of Mimi in 2005, and it became her big comeback album. That album, Carey writes, was “also a major moment” for her fans. “It was what they needed ... to see me come back like that. I really believe, for better or for worse, the Lambily, the fans and I, go through things together.”