Mariah Carey Reclaims Her Legacy
By: Richard Lebeau
Tags: Books, Writing, Music, Racism, Culture

“The Meaning of Mariah Carey”: Book Review

For the past few years, Mariah has occasionally alluded to a plan to write a memoir in which she would share the story of her childhood, the truth behind the endless and outrageous tabloid rumors, and the inspiration for many of her most beloved songs. Earlier this year, she delighted fans with the announcement that this plan had become a reality and that the book would be released on September 29th.

Co-written with author and activist Michaela Angela Davis, the memoir was released to some of the best reviews of Mariah’s career and great commercial success (it topped the prestigious New York Times Bestseller list the week it debuted). And it deserves all of the critical and commercial success it received — and then some.

Mariah Carey does an in-depth interview with Oprah Winfrey to discuss the memoir (Image copyright: AppleTV)

It is no surprise to me that The Meaning of Mariah Carey is a great read. Mariah Carey’s life story is a fascinating and entertaining one. The Cinderella-esque origin story is the stuff of legend and the tremendous ups and downs that followed have been fodder for the tabloids for the last three decades. It is almost impossible to tell this story in a manner that is not engaging. Also, I figured that if she is even half as good at writing prose as she is at lyrics, the memoir would be a thing of beauty.

What did surprise me is the depth and timeliness of the book. She goes far beyond the typical trappings of the celebrity memoir and digs deep into painful, complicated discussions of issues related to racism, poverty, child abuse, misogyny, mental health, police brutality, dysfunctional family dynamics, and spirituality. This is no puff piece.

The memoir is told in four parts. The first is “Wayward Child,” a searing look at her upbringing on Long Island with her Irish opera singer mother Patricia and her Black engineer father Alfred Roy, who divorced when she was a toddler. Her relationships with both of them, as well as her ill-fated older siblings named Morgan and Allison, are described with remarkable complexity. She describes their notable strengths and gives compassionate, empathic context to their failings, making it very clear that the boundaries she has famously drawn with them were out of self-preservation not a lack of love or respect. This section of the memoir helps fans truly understand how feeling so out of place as a biracial child and the truly traumatic events she endured were formative in Mariah’s personal and artistic development, facts that have only been alluded to for most of her career.

In the cleverly titled second section “Sing Sing,” Mariah recounts the early 1990s, a period when she had unprecedented, record-breaking commercial success but was trapped in a suffocating at best and abusive at worst relationship with the man who “discovered” her and controlled her career. Mariah is much more interested in telling us about the personal journey she went through during these years then recounting the writing and recording of the iconic songs and albums released during this time, although she certainly weaves in some delicious anecdotes (like the revelation that while recording Daydream she wrote and recorded a grunge album as a way of blowing off steam.) Tommy Mottola’s denial of her blackness and misogynistic subjugation of her is sadly not surprising nor is it an uncommon experience, but I can’t recall the last time it was captured so vividly on paper.

After taking us through her divorce from Tommy, the liberation she experienced recording Butterfly, and her bold bid to get herself out of her oppressive record deal, Mariah takes a look at the low point of her career in the third section, entitled “All That Glitters.” She gives context to how her disastrous film debut Glitter went so far off-course from its initial conception and the infamous breakdown she had during the time of its release. The chapters paint the portrait of a woman who, although admittedly struggling with her mental health, was driven to the breaking point by unrealistic demands by her record label and betrayal by loved ones. It is a painful, haunting segment that gives the necessary background to understand the breakdown of her personal and professional life.

The fourth and final section, entitled “Emancipation,” whisks through the nearly two decades that followed Glitter. Here the memoir becomes a bit less focused, but no less riveting and impactful, as it touches on a number of different areas, including how super producer LA Reid helped her achieve her astonishing comeback with 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi, her return to acting with the Oscar-winning film Precious, her whirlwind romance with Nick Cannon, the birth of her twins, and her interactions with countless legends (including Prince, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Nelson Mandela, and Muhammad Ali). The memoir ends with her basking in the joy of her sold-out Christmas concert in Madison Square Garden and the historic 19th #1 she obtained when “All I Want for Christmas Is You” achieved the top spot.

The memoir is also fascinating for what is not in it. There is no mention of either of her ill-fated forays into reality television (as a judge on American Idol and as the subject of the docu-series Mariah’s World), her alleged fling with Eminem that generated a musical showdown, her engagement to Australian billionaire James Packer, her supposed rivalry with other divas (although she indirectly references those she supposedly has with Celine Dion and Jennifer Lopez), criticisms that her voice is significantly degrading, and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder that she boldly embraced on a People cover in 2018. I suppose its possible that she’s embarrassed about these things and omitted them to save face or that she’s saving some stories for a follow-up memoir, but I believe that the real reason she omitted them is the one she gave in numerous interviews that asked about them — they were blips in the timeline of her life that were beloved by tabloids but simply weren’t integral to the meaning of Mariah Carey.

Click here to read about Mariah going public about her mental health.

The memoir does a remarkable job of sticking with what is important about the personal and professional journey of Mariah Carey, with limited tangents. It beautifully integrates lyrics and artwork. (The audiobook version, which I have yet to experience, also weaves in musical interludes.) It also paints a remarkable portrait of the lingering psychological impacts and complex interactions of racism, sexism, and poverty in modern America. And through it all, Mariah’s voice comes through. Her unshakable optimism, her under-appreciated wit, and her trademark mix of sophisticated vocabulary and playful slang make even the bleakest moments impossible to look away from.

Rating for “The Meaning of Mariah Carey”: 5/5 stars