Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell Carly Simon -- And the Journey of a Generation

Sheila Weller

Atria

By Amy Linden

I'm in junior high. It's the early 70's. Almost everyone I know has a copy of Joni Mitchell's Blue, Carole King's Tapestry and Carly Simon's "You're So Vain," and even though I can't really relate to much of what they are singing about, those women, more than any other (male) singer-songwriters, introduce me to a distant--maybe after high school--world where having your heart broken made for really cool songs.

Yet for all of their importance and in King's case commercial dominance, only Mitchell has earned the full-on chronicling; so much so that outside of Barney Hoskyns' masterful book Hotel California--you'd think Joni was the only lady in the canyon.

Sheila Weller's exhaustive, illuminating, engaging and entertaining work rights the wrong. She not only gives King and Simon some much overdue dap but flushes out Mitchell's far more familiar saga beyond "Our House"'s open tuning, chain smoking, affair-having muse. Drawing upon numerous unnamed sources, friends on and off the record, documents, and, in her case Carly Simon, Girls Like Us is about the totality of King, Simon and Mitchell's lives: their loves, childhood, families and, of course the music that remarked upon all of the above.

Naturally Girls Like Us has some dish and revelations. For instance, Carole King became a mother barely out of high school and while married, her (now) ex-husband Gerry Goffin had a baby with another woman. Carly Simon's grandmother was Spanish and Catholic, and Joni Mitchell painted a portrait of her boyfriend with a hard on. Perhaps the greatest eye opener is owing to relationships both professional (King) and personal (Simon and Mitchell), James Taylor is the axis of evil, the folk-rock missing link and a rotten boyfriend/husband. Jackson Browne doesn't come off too good, either, but we all sort of knew that already, right?

For all the rock star stuff, what ultimately makes this book so meaningful is that, indeed these women are like us. Sure, they go through their drama with way more cash but at the end of the day this is about how women pay for sexual freedom.  How even when you write a Number One single, a woman still navigates the give and take between career and family, put up with men's bullshit (and in Kings' case abuse) and through it all keep it together; not because they can but because, as all women know, have to.