Think Mariah Carey’s hits are over the top? Wait till you see her memoirs!
The Meaning Of Mariah Carey
Mariah Carey with Michaela Angela Davis Pan Macmillan £20
Describing herself as a ‘ global icon, award-winning singer-songwriter, producer, actress, mother, daughter, sister, storyteller and artist’, Mariah Carey can never be accused of selling herself short. Befitting the diva’s diva, her memoir duly offers an abundance of prima facie prima-donna evidence.
Yet Carey was not born into glittering opulence; she had to work at being high-maintenance. She grew up in a domestic ‘war zone’, her parents splitting when she was four. Her violent, ‘diabolically charismatic’ brother was implicated in a local murder, while her sister allegedly drugged her with Valium, offered her cocaine, scalded her and tried to ‘sell me out to a pimp’ – all before Carey turned 13. She barely saw her late father, while her relationship with her mother remains ‘ a prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment’. As a mixed- race child, she was racially abused and left with lifelong identity issues.
Carey spends the first 100 pages outlining her awful upbringing, and the remainder picking through its legacy. For a ‘ global icon’ there’s little sense of the outer world. This oddly insular book is a primer on the suffocating effects of fame.
Barely out of her teens, she married her record-label boss, Sony CEO Tommy Mottola, who was twice her age and called her ‘The Franchise’. Controlling and vindictive, Mottola had their house wired up for surveillance. Outdoors, his wife was constantly shadowed by security goons.
Carey skips over subsequent romances, revealing she has a ‘no rapper rule’ in matters of the heart. Sketches of her interactions with Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Prince and Diana Ross are disappointingly decorous: Prince is a ‘ brother angel’ who sends her a Bible bound in deepbrown leather, with gold embossed letters; Ross eyes up her extravagant entourage and says, drily, ‘ Mariah, someday you’re not gonna want to have all these people around you.’ But she can be withering when t he occasion demands. She refuses to utter the name of rival diva Jennifer Lopez, while the picture section is positively Stalinist, omitting any images of her ‘ex-siblings’ or two ex-husbands.
As with Carey’s music, t he default setting is melodrama, trending towards histrionics. The text is saturated in therapy-speak, knee deep in God, angels, healing and blessings, each epiphany
‘The text is knee-deep in God, angels, healing and blessings, each epiphany framed by Carey’s Hallmark-card lyrics’
framed by Carey’s Hallmarkcard lyrics, presented throughout as Sylvia Plat h-like genius. Fleeting encounters are granted comically cosmic significance. When
Nelson Mandela smiles at her, ‘in an instant I felt my very constitution change’. At one point, her dress is given a police escort. Yet she is also winningly down- to- earth – ‘ some of the names have been changed to protect the d***heads’ – and can turn a neat phrase: ‘Half of me was black and all of me was poor.’
She comes across as driven, demanding, status- obsessed, even slightly delusional. One wonders whether a printing error excised the parts where Carey accepts at least some responsibility for her missteps. Nothing, it seems, is ever her fault.
Now 50, the mother of twins Roc and Roe, with many ‘gorgeous, pristine and palatial homes’, Carey claims she is ‘peaceful… complete’. Good for her. Her memoir may be preposterous, partial and self-aggrandising, but it’s also entertaining, funny, sad and, in ways its subject perhaps didn’t always intend, genuinely revealing.