Thirty years into an epic career, Mariah Carey is still trying to explain herself.
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Mariah Carey loves Christmas.She loves it with a fanatics strict adherence to the laws of Christmas joy.
She loves it like no one has ever loved Christmas before.
(Did you have an actual reindeer at your holiday festivities last year?
Did you hang out with Santa?
Didnt think so.)
Christmas is also a cornerstone of the Carey complex.
Since the song dropped on her 1994 holiday album, its made an estimated $60 million-plus in royalties.
Last year, it finally hit No.
1 on The Hot 100 chart, after a record-breaking (for its slowness) 25-year journey.
Who cares how long it took?
Its her 19th No.
1 hit putting her above Elvis and one away from tying the Beatles.
Does it matter if you like the song?
(Full disclosure: I dont.)
It is the omnipresent anthem of holiday happiness.
She mutes her iPad mic to greet me quickly.
(Everyone in her immediate orbit is reduced to first and last initial.
Stories sound like mathematical equations in which M.C.
Im so sorry this is running late!
Shell be with me soon, she says.
She just has to find a diplomatic way to let these men know something they are suggesting is ugly!
She goes back to the call.
This is what we expect of her, no?
The Diva who bathes in milk and will only be photographed from the right side.
Hoone-aaay, while she holds her finger to her ear to keep pitch.
So its hard to be mad at Carey for fully embodying all the various Mariahisms that define her.
Anything less would feel like short shrift, to be honest.
Plus shes a generous diva.
Shes dispatched her five-person team, her COVID-quarantine pod, to tend to me while I wait.
Would you like it with jam or powdered sugar?
(She has a sun allergy, she insists.)
Her time zone has other quirks: True Love only occurs in summer, underneath the stars.
Winter is always joyous.
Any day has the potential to be Christmas.
One cannot be dismissed if one demands what one needs operatically.
One cannot be told what is or is not age-appropriate if one doesnt acknowledge age.
Anyway, the whole 12 thing its sort of a joke and its sort of not.
Carey turned 50 in March, and Moroccan and Monroe a.k.a.
Roc and Roe, a.k.a.
One milestone is colliding with another.
Its 300-plus meaning-packed pages, and, yes, what she didnt include has meaning too.
Its her turn now to emancipate that scared little girl, she says.
Carey strolls out to where Roc and Roe are waiting to surprise her.
The conference Zoom is over, but theres one more thing to attend to before we can sit down.
The song is a long-delayed collaboration with Ms. Lauryn Hill they conceived of in 2011.
Rocky hits every dance currently popular on TikTok.
Rocky loves TikTok, but Carey thinks hes too young to be on it.
Okay, I was really on a business call, Carey says, mildly annoyed at the whole situation.
People assumed she just declined because she wasnt wearing makeup.
Plus she wasnt the one who set up the account for him.
Co-parenting, she says, then sings, Yeah, it aint easy, baby.
But you know what?
We keep it good for them, she says of Cannon, whom she divorced in 2014.
Roe, wait, Im tangled, she screams, while Rocky emits a loud belch and giggles.
Carey says good night to the twins.
Its an atmospherically nice night, and she decides she wants to go outside to talk.
Its better, right?
Ellen, will you make us some horse devoirs, Carey asks, intentionally mispronouncing the word.
Thats what we call em.
Are you cold, Mariah?
asks Kristofer, who exits to grab her a little throw.
Are you guys warm enough?
asks Ellen, who enters to put down snacks.
More candles are placed around us.
Dont put that down there for me, because that is hideous, exclaims Carey.
The candle is whisked away.
Shes a little tired, she apologizes, and already a little emotional.
Can you believe Im back here?
she says, sighing.
Here is an upstate rich-persons enclave not far from whereMartha Stewart is thirst-trappingwith her chickens.
Mottola discovered and signed Carey when she was 19.
They married in 1993, when she was 23 and he was 43.
Carey has repeatedly described the marriage as controlling.
She felt like a prisoner.
With a wave of her hand: I say it all in the book.
Id rather people read it that way.
She takes a long sip from a big goblet of red wine.
And by the way, I forgot a lot of that stuff when I was writing the book.
Even its emotional contours were out there already, in her own words, mostly in song lyrics.
(And she does, may she remind us, write her own songs.
And theres a lot of different people referenced in that from my point of view as a songwriter.
And then back to the main verse: But you cant manipulate me like before.
Its like Ive been telling this story if someone cared to look deep enough.
The knowledge that this stuff is already out there made it easier for Carey to write the memoir.
of his apartment building.
She wore a buttery leather Chanel skirt.
She remembers her boots and the rain and her hair curling in stunning detail.
Of course I do!
I can never forget that moment, she says.
Her anxiety around Mottola sits just under the surface.
He was like this oppressive humidity, she says.
She could never escape.
Carey suspects he tried to sabotage her career after they divorced.
Its out there, she says.
She also knows he might be angered by her perspective, though she hopes hes not.
I could have gone harder, she says, suggesting she could have painted him as a monster.
I give him credit where credit is due.
So picking this same upstate enclave forher self-quarantine palacedoes seem inconceivable, but the kids needed space.
Not that the apartment wasnt spacious, she explains.
(We know; we all saw it onCribsin 2002.)
They know that Im here for them.
Thats what I didnt have.
They will never have a holiday thats not happy unless something I cant do anything about happens.
They understand that they are Black.
They have a whole lot of self-esteem and self-worth that I never had.
And I probably still dont now.
I know that I still dont.
Shes been up all day like actual day.
But maybe one day Ill feel equal to the rest of the human race.
I didnt even think I was worthy of happiness and success.
I thought I wasnt allowed to be that person that would have that.
Like, sitting here, looking at this?
And after describing the shack?
I always say, Im only 12, yay!
One of the good memories.
She never felt like her home situation was stable.
She was always aware of tension between her parents and between her parents and her siblings.
School wasnt much better.
In the book, she catalogues the racial slights she suffered at the hands of white children.
She writes about her childhood as the thing she had to overcome to become Mariah Carey.
Carey writes about witnessing Morgans volatility and fights with her mother.
Alison and Morgan both believed I had it easier than they did, she writes.
She doesnt want them to see her as an ATM machine with a wig, she says.
I never would have spoken about my family at all had they not done it first.
I ask Carey if there is any chance of reconciliation with her ex-siblings in the future.
I think theyre very broken, and I feel sad for them.
Carey still takes care of her, financially, and always will.
She is one of the books dedicatees.
I cried writing a lot of parts of this book.
Maybe its because I have such vivid recollections.
Im sure Im going to have to deal with a lot of people being upset with me.
Im really, really mixed, Carey sings at me, turning her lifelong repetition into a little ditty.
Not to make a song out of it.
Thats what we do.
When she cites feelings of alienation or shame, its often at the hands of white people.
Its the Black women in her life who held her up when nobody else did.
Her Nana Reese (her great-aunt on her fathers side) provided some stability.
Her aunties were the ones who tried to help her learn how to do her hair.
Da Brat once helped her escape Sing Sing to go get fries from Burger King.
They had a nickname for her when she got in this mode: Militant Riah.
There were a couple of times that she was like, Youre being too careful.
I would never be good enough for some white people.
And yet, when she first debuted as an artist, a number of reviews misidentified her heritage.
In 1990, a Los AngelesTimeswriter called her a white singer who has a black vocal style.
In her book, she references how her label sometimes scrubbed her music of its urban inflections.
She recalls recording the Fantasy remix with ODB in 1995 and playing it for Mottola.
The fuck is that?
I can do that.
Get the fuck outta here with that.
Carey would eventually cease to be considered solely pop, becoming more of a crossover pophip-hopR&B fixture.
Even still, shes spent a significant portion of her post-Mottola era defending her biracial identity.
(She ended up writing the NAACP, and the special was taken off the air.)
The commentary didnt stop in the 2000s.
(He decided on the latter.)
But Vision of Love, she reminds me, went to No.
1 on the R&B charts first.
In the 1990s, being a white artist or a Black artist often created deeply divergent music careers.
Davis and Carey met in 2005 at an early-listening event forTheEmancipation of Mimi,one of Careys comeback albums.
Four years earlier, Carey had suffered her first major flop with the movieGlitter.
She had a public breakdown and was hospitalized for exhaustion after she made an erratic appearance onTRL.
Im real, she mic-drops.)
At the time, Davis was an editor at the magazine.
Black women have always grounded her in truth, she says.
Essencehad never had Carey on the cover before.
In the end, Davis won.
At the end, the article declared her a grown ass Black woman.
The cover line read: Americas Most Misunderstood Black Woman.
That was 15 years ago.
Believe you me, Im not thrilled to be this skin tone all the time.
Its a horrible way of defining somebody.
It actually means mule.
Which is an even deeper kind of a pain, pile of pain, if that makes sense.
Its been a lot.
She has wanted to write the memoir for a decade, she says.
Whether or not it suddenly became okay to deal with stuff, this book was coming out anyway.
She doesnt want to seem like shes capitalizing on the moment.
But the current moment does seem to keep giving new context for her experiences.
Its from 2008, when there were rumors Carey was pregnant.
I was extremely uncomfortable with that moment is all I can say.
And I really have had a hard time grappling with the aftermath, she says.
I wasnt ready to tell anyone because I had had a miscarriage.
But what am I supposed to do?
Its like, [sings] What are you going to do?
Her fans have also helped her reexamine her past.
The movie did come out the week after 9/11; it never truly got a fair shake.
Because I dont feel like theres a mental-illness discussion to be had, she says when I ask.
It is not to deny that.
I am not denying that.
I just dont know that I believe in any one diagnosis for a situation or a human being.
Because we can all be wounded, but are we going to sit around licking our wounds forever?
Its nearing 4 a.m.,and she could talk more, but she desperately needs to use the loo.
Its the narrative that has propulsed her to greatness; its also her mental loop.
Carey comes back from the bathroom and, it turns out, a costume change.
Shes swapped her peasant blouse for a black satin kimono robe.
Her emotional-support dog is waiting in bed for her.
Her two kids are upstairs, happy but maybe only pretending to be asleep.
Despite how legends want to be seen, this is probably how we most want to see them.
Oh, Im good at diffusing tense situations because of my childhood, she says.
Despite urging me to leave, he pulls up a chair, and they start swapping memories.
Not everyone was there, but everyone agrees it was amazing.
By the way, this should have been in the book, she says.
Yes, everyone agrees, it should have been in the book.
There was a lot thatcouldhave been in the book.
Theres so much more dragging that could have been done, she says.
