In a new memoir, MARIAH CAREY looks back on her traumatic childhood.

In an explosive new tell-all, superstar Mariah Carey shares the details of her difficult, often heartbreaking childhood

It seemed like a Cinderella story. At the tender age of 22, Mariah Carey — a then-unknown singer with a five-octave range — took the world by storm, winning the heart of Sony exec Tommy Mottola while scoring Grammy after Grammy.

But her beginnings were far from a fairy tale. In The Meaning of Mariah Carey, the diva’s new memoir, she details an upbringing fraught with violence, poverty and conflict, during which she felt “uprooted and unprotected,” like “an outsider” at home. “We shared common blood, yet I felt like a stranger among them all,” Mariah, 50, writes of her largely absent father, overworked mother and two troubled older siblings. “An intruder in my own family.”

FEAR AND ABUSE

While Mariah inherited her singing skills from her divorcée mom, Patricia, a former opera singer, she says most of her childhood was focused on survival. The star’s tellall describes several alleged violent incidents involving brother Morgan, as well as sister Alison’s drugging her with Valium when Mariah was 12 and subjecting her to the advances of an unstable, gun-wielding boyfriend. Eventually, Alison went to live with their dad, the author notes, leaving her “caught between my brother’s fury and my mother’s sad searching.”

It wasn’t until she and ex-husband Nick Cannon welcomed twins Moroccan and Monroe, now 9, that Mariah truly understood the joy that family could bring. “When I became a mother...my heart grew two times over,” she shares. “[And] as my capacity for pure love expanded, the ability to tow heavy pain from my past diminished.”