THE MEANING OF MARIAH CAREY by Mariah Carey and Michaela Angela Davis


PUBLISHER: Andy Cohn Books, 9/2020
GENRE: Nonfiction/Memoir
MY GRADE: C

SYNOPSIS: It took me a lifetime to have the courage and the clarity to write my memoir. I want to tell the story of the moments - the ups and downs, the triumphs and traumas, the debacles and the dreams, that contributed to the person I am today. Though there have been countless stories about me throughout my career and very public personal life, it’s been impossible to communicate the complexities and depths of my experience in any single magazine article or a ten-minute television interview. And even then, my words were filtered through someone else’s lens, largely satisfying someone else’s assignment to define me.

This book is composed of my memories, my mishaps, my struggles, my survival and my songs. Unfiltered. I went deep into my childhood and gave the scared little girl inside of me a big voice. I let the abandoned and ambitious adolescent have her say, and the betrayed and triumphant woman I became tell her side.

Writing this memoir was incredibly hard, humbling and healing. My sincere hope is that you are moved to a new understanding, not only about me, but also about the resilience of the human spirit. Love, Mariah
MY THOUGHTS:
My opinion of Mariah is that she's a narcissist who basks in her accomplishments. She's not humble and seems very unrelatable. I do appreciate her talking about her very dysfunctional family and abusive first marriage.

She refuses to ever say her age and most of the time the year she's talking about isn't mentioned so you have to figure out what year which single she's talking about was out then go from there. It's always been written in articles and Wikipedia that she was born in 1970 but I see now Wikipedia has her birth date as 1969, which shocks me.

She told the world a few years ago that she's bipolar yet never mentions it in the book, never mentioned getting huge breast implants in the late 90s, never mentioned gaining a lot of weight years ago, and never mentioned anything regarding her appearance. I'm guessing she needed some attention back when she told us about being bipolar.

She very clearly dislikes white people and doesn't try to hide it though she doesn't come right out and say it. She makes her ex-husband Tommy Mottola out to be racist but doesn't come right out and say that either. She claims her two siblings, who are older than her, were jealous of her growing up because her skin's lighter than theirs but didn't give any examples of comments they may have said to her to make her believe they were jealous of her lighter skin, so we don't know if their supposed jealousy is fact or fiction.

While she's definitely a victim of some things (shitty parents and siblings and shitty first husband) she plays the victim a whole lot, woe is me! She tells of an incident after Glitter, the film, came out, where she blew up verbally at her mother and her mother called the police. The police, escorted by her brother Morgan, took her to a 'spa' that was a mental institution where she had to stay for a few days or so. It's very unclear to me why she was taken there in the first place. She didn't say if the police told her she had to commit herself or was being committed. I guess there was a conversation she didn't tell us about where the officer(s) discussed that committing herself may be a good idea. But who knows? I'm sure a little more went on than just her yelling at her mother and that we didn't get the full story.

Her father's a piece of shit (physically abusing her siblings) yet where's her dislike for him? He's mentioned near the beginning of this memoir and not again until the end, and is included in her 'tribe of angels' section at the back where she's thanking people. It's not just your mother's fault you grew up poor. Why wasn't your father helping support you?


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