Natural Artiface

Carole King’s memoir, Natural Woman, needs remixing and engineering.  As a songwriter, it was only until late in her career that she ventured into lyrics.  Her earliest attempts were more like scat, doo-wop sounds.  Her first husband and later a collaborating poet came up with the words that she put to music.  And there is the rub:  she just doesn’t have the literary heft to be a robust author.  She puts her life down in sequence, like she would in ordering songs on an LP, but it doesn’t come through with one single message or even a clear, honest assessment of her life.

Carole comes off as caught up between being a female rocker and a good Jewish girl from Brooklyn.  For someone who wrote the background music to pre-British invasion teenage summer loves, she made absolutely awful choices in marriages and lovers.  Her first husband got caught up in the 60s drug culture; her second physically abused her; she ends up in Idaho as a 1980s earth mother figure, or a female John Denver, singing about simple pleasures and middle age pain.  Of course, she crossed paths with everyone, Lennon and McCartney, to Bono.  But see drops names rather than describing who knowing them changed her life or perspective.

With four children from her first two marriages, Carole was often an absentee mother, touring or surrendering them to their fathers on the excuse of schooling needs or geographic preferences on their parts.

The best memoirs I’ve read begin after the author has thought about his or her life, determined what events or emotions have been determinants or emerging from experiences, and interpreted and valued them.  Natural Woman is a diary or chronology.  Carole describes the needlework she did when recording Tapestry, a simple piece of busywork that embellished the words thank you to be given to her producer.  Her autobiography is just as superficial, a collection of sample stitches, nothing like Gobelin artistic depiction of history.