Near the end of her new memoir Boys in the Trees, Carly Simon writes: “I’m not the type of person to let go of my past easily. My memory is too good.”
Indeed, Ms. Simon’s memory is beyond good as she recaptures her life from childhood to about the mid-1980s, after she had reached the pinnacle of musical stardom and following the breakup of her marriage to James Taylor. But her memory also had help. Throughout her life Ms. Simon has been a dutiful diarist, and so the whole of her life — the events, thoughts and conversations of almost every day — were just an arm’s length away waiting to be reborn.
On Sunday, Dec. 20 at 4 p.m., Ms. Simon will give a book signing at the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven.
The Simon family with a young Carly to the left of her brother Peter. — Courtesy Peter Simon
The memoir took more than three years to write she said in a recent interview at her home off Lambert’s Cove Road in Vineyard Haven. “The first six or eight months was just research.”
She pored over her diaries, looking for clues and the melody of her life. She has long been a songwriter and the act of completing a book was in a way merely a longer version of what she had always been doing. And although it wasn’t a conscious decision, the patterns in a song also served as a guide.
“It’s a book whose chorus you don’t find out until it’s over and then you see if there is a chorus, a repeated phrase, or a repeated idea,” she said. “The beast, in a way, is kind of like a chorus. But not really. It’s more of a leitmotif. I think the big chorus doesn’t happen for me until the end when I start talking about forgiveness.”
The beast Ms. Simon refers to is the aggressive embodiment of the hurt and insecurity she felt in her life. And it does appear throughout the book, beginning when she was a little girl, the third daughter born into a wealthy New York family whose father Richard Simon started the publishing company that would become Simon and Schuster.
Performing with James Taylor at the Oak Bluffs School. — Courtesy Carly Simon
“I saw that the effect my father had on me was so crucial because of the lack of self esteem that I got from his not wanting a third daughter,” she said of her childhood. “I wasn’t beloved to him. And I saw it in contrast with how he was with my sisters.”
She developed a crippling stutter as a young girl, which made her shy and afraid of her own voice, a feeling that never went away. “I don’t like to be on stage either because I don’t like to be in the spotlight and that probably has to do with the early days in school and being called on in class and I couldn’t say anything because of my stammer,” she said.
A strange scenario for someone who has spent so much of her life on stage, performing for millions. But incongruities and insecurities are often at the heart of art and the drive to succeed. Click here to continue reading.
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