Mediaman's Reviews > The Meaning of Mariah Carey

Surprising stories poorly told. This incredibly negative, depressing book has some interesting stories from Mariah Carey's childhood, including a lot of details about her horrible family, but it's so poorly written and repetitive that you almost want to give up after reading 100 pages of nothing but negativity. Then you move on to almost another hundred depressing pages about her early career and first husband. Over halfway through the book there hasn't been one positive, upbeat, or carefree moment at all--which is quite the opposite of the image Mariah Carey likes to project.

Only about 30 of the 340 pages contain anything positive, but it doesn't first happen until she meets Derek Jeter closer to the 200 page point. It only lasts for 20 pages, then you dive back into her non-stop sad stories where she blames everyone else but herself for her problems. The only fairly positive thing comes near the end of the book when she rushes to summarize her last twenty years and includes a couple pages about Nick Cannon, but otherwise the memoir is one of the most negative I've ever read.

The lack of redemptive qualities in the text are surprising since Carey claims to be such a deep person of spiritual faith and thinks God gave her a vision as a child to inspire the world. She claims to have a huge following of "Lambs" that understand her spirit and who she inspires. But this isn't inspirational in the least.

She is to blame for many of her adult problems and she choose to stick with some really bad characters, including her first husband, her mother, her brother, and her sister. To now complain about how terrible they were to her (including institutionalizing her and working contracts to their advantage instead of hers) seems sour grapes for her own inability to act and think like a real adult. Yes, she had an amazingly traumatic childhood, but once you become a multimillionaire pop star in your mid-20s, you no longer can blame others for your allowing them to mistreat you for the next twenty years when you sign the deals and you keep them on the payroll.

The book is way too repetitive, even telling some facts twice, and timelines jump all over the place in what appears to be her attempt to hide some things. She starts the book claiming time means nothing to her, and anyone that has had to work with her knows the disrespect she shows others by failing to show up at agreed up on times. But it's also a way for her to control others and hide her inabilities. What it really needs is a serious editor to stand up to her, cut 100 pages, then insist that she cover the last couple decades in much more detail.

It also is too braggadocious when it comes to her claiming music success, thinking her songs are classics by reprinting the simplistic lyrics throughout. Yes, she did win awards and set some Billboard records, but life should be measured by much more than that. She seems delusional in spots and fails to address some of the very public problems with her flighty, rude personality. The mental picture Mariah Carey has of herself doesn't match reality, and makes the reader suspect how accurate a picture she then presents of the other people that get bashed so boldly on the pages. After the hundredth mention of her horrible brother or mooching mother or trashy sister or controlling husband we get the point--she has an axe to grind and is using the memoir to get back at others instead of self-reflection and inner revelations.

So instead of focusing on interesting stories of albums or recording sessions or working with others or her own failures, she keeps returning to the hurt child that is mad at her family and ex-husbands. While she claims emancipation, it becomes obvious that Mariah Carey is not really free as a butterfly at all and hasn't really found her meaning.