A diva takes aim
Mariah Carey’s book is a score- settling screed of self- absorbed self- justification by a stranger to self- awareness, writes
After 19 US No 1 singles – the most by any solo artist in history – and 200 million album sales, the one thing that Mariah Carey would like her readers to know is that being Mariah Carey has never been easy.
First, there is her ghastly family. Sharing suspiciously detailed memories from the age of three, Carey recalls her warring parents being blind to the confusion she felt as a mixed- race child; uncomprehending of her Christmas fixation, although “not every
Christmas was ruined by my family”; and ignorant of her burgeoning talent.
Her ascetic father spent the decades she ignored him compiling scrapbooks of her achievements, but his chief virtue was not asking his wealthy daughter for money. Her mother “did not have the capacity to fully celebrate me as I matured into an accomplished artist”. Her
“ex- sister” became a drug addict and prostitute, while her brother, whose loan was pivotal in starting her career and who would rescue her during her 2001 breakdown (“I did not have a breakdown, I was broken down”), is “unpredictable, volatile and violent”, not least in demanding $ 5,000 to “take care” of a stepfather.
Then there’s her men, chiefly Tommy Mottola, label boss, mastermind behind her rise and first husband.
Carey neglects to explain why she married this charmless man, preferring to concentrate on how unspeakably awful life was in the mansion she nicknamed Sing Sing. Perhaps predictably, when, at a marriage therapist’s suggestion, Mottola permits her a solo night out, Carey immediately takes up with dopey baseball galactico Derek Jeter.
Later, there would be dopey Latin superstar Luis Miguel (“We were both Aries and we vibed energetically”), whom she dumped on grounds of “stodginess”. Later still, dopey husband No 2 Nick Cannon, whose days were numbered from the moment a doctor they saw during her pregnancy remarked, “Poor Nick, he’s so exhausted”.
Luckily, for Mariah there is no situation too torrid that it cannot be salvaged by quoting her own lyrics. As she gushes when citing Hero during the Mottola chapters, “when you feel like hope is gone, look inside you and be strong”. Inspirational.
Not quite everyone emerges as untrustworthy, disloyal, unappreciative, duplicitous, controlling or grasping: Prince seems like a normal, everyday sort of fella and Michelle Obama the sort of gal to whom, in the intimacy of a meet’n’greet line, you’d reveal ( before family and friends) that you were having twins.
Princess Mariah never met Princess Diana, but they once attended the same party: “Our eyes locked… we were both cornered animals in couture.” Likewise, Nelson Mandela: “I was with him for just a moment, but what a moment. I felt the energy
of ancient ancestry and the future; of struggles and sacrifice; of unshakable faith and vision. Mr Mandela smiled at me: in that instant I felt my constitution change.”
It is so sloppily edited that a lengthy rant justifying the failure of her film Glitter is repeated word- forword 40 pages later, while supposed heroine Aretha Franklin’s 11th album is referred to as her debut. The Meaning of Mariah Carey is a scoresettling screed of self- absorbed selfjustification by a stranger to selfawareness. It is, of course, fantastic.