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

• Brain candy for boomer women (and the men who want to understand them)

  
  By A1725KPO7A5ULX on 2008-04-08
  525 pages about Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon --- and this is my candidate for "beach book of 2008" for smart boomer women?
  
  I'm not kidding. It's that good. And that addictive.
  
  Just read the opening section about 14-year-old Carole Klein, sitting with her friend Camille Cacciatore as they leaf through the Brooklyn phone book in search of a name. Kick...Kiel...Klip. How about King? Yeah, King. And then it was off to Camille's house, where the choice was spaghetti-and-meatballs or peppers-and-onions.
  
  Anyone can use clips and rumor to write about the famous. Sheila Weller puts you in the room. Her methods are exhaustive journalism --- she's written six books, she's won prizes, she's the real deal --- and empathy. So the path from nowhere to immortality for King, Mitchell and Simon is an epic tale, and Weller's scope is vast --- to track "the journey of a generation." Only on the surface is this a book about music, and who makes it, and how, and why. The bigger subject, the better subject, is how women found their way in their professional and personal lives, 1960-now. So, for Weller, these stories are about "a course of self-discovery, change, and unhappy confrontation with the limits of change."
  
  Limits?
  
  Consider this: In 1960, H.W. Janson's "History of Art" --- the standard textbook --- cited 2,300 artists.
  
  How many were female?
  
  Not one.
  
  That's the culture these women were entering. Women as decorative armpieces. As silent helpers. Sexual objects. And uncomplaining victims.
  
  Each of these women fought that culture. Not because she wanted to --- simply out of biography and necessity. Joan Anderson gets polio as a kid, and her creativity is pushed inward. Carly Simon may be the daughter of one of the founders of Simon & Schuster, but in her case "privileged" refers mostly to her father, who banished his kids from his sight when he came home from work. Carol King writes hits with a kid in her lap.
  
  There's delicious dish in these pages. Sailing to New York on the U.S.S. United States, Sean Connery propositioning both Carly and her sister Lucy. [Lucy accepted his offer --- alone.] Carole meeting the Beatles. [They were thrilled.] Joni being spanked by her husband and, later, getting smacked around by Jackson Browne. Carly getting it on in cabs, under a bridge in Central Park, and, minutes after meeting James Taylor, in a bathroom.
  
  Everyone of import in the history of rock appears in these pages. Men come and go, most of them hideously inappropriate. And then there's the --- shall we say --- cross-pollination. Give James Taylor the sword of gold; he befriended King and did a lot more with Mitchell and Simon. Messy stuff, all of it, and revealing about the way relationships play out in the superstar set. My favorite moment: decades after "You're So Vain", Warren Beatty came up --- and on --- to Carly at the Carlyle Hotel. "What are you doing in town?" he asked. "Seeing my oncologist," said Carly, who was then afflicted with cancer. Guess Warren's reaction.
  
  They're grandmothers now. Hard to believe. I still want to see them as they were --- young and shiny, the future rich in possibility. This book charts the price they paid, the pain and the foolishness. It's a splendid chance for women of a certain age --- and the men who love them --- to look back and grid their own lives over these years.
  
  Which makes for a terrific beach book.
  
  
  
  

• No Secrets

  
  By A30TK6U7DNS82R on 2008-04-24
  Everything in GIRLS LIKE US will be amazingly familiar to those of us born in the bay boom, and yet Sheila Weller, a talented if erratic prose stylist, brings us to emotional places that will be new to all but those most intimate with the trio of songwriters whose lives, she declares, form a "journey of a generation." I don't know if I'd go that far, but I'm not a woman, and Weller's argument is that King, Simon, and Mitchell pushes back the barriers for women specifically, "one song at a time."
  
  The cryptic one remains Carole King, whom Weller just can't illuminate in any meaningful way. Her life was amazing--up to a point, then it stopped being of any interest at all, which is a shame. We hear again and again how she wrote all those Brill Building masterpieces before she was 21, and broke down under the strain of a troubled marriage to a high-stakes husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, coming out the other end with an LP. Tapestry, that everyone loved. Then what happened? Bad men galore, attracted to her wealth. She once estimated that every time she divorced a man, it cost her a million dollars. Weller gives us all the facts ad nauseam but we always wonder, why did King do this to herself?
  
  Carly Simon, on the other hand, who cooperated with Weller extensively or so it seems, comes off as nearly normal. Of the upper, upper middle class, Simon was to the manor born and the icy, plangent chords of her first song, "That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be," gave notice that the old New Yorker fiction writers of the 40s and 50s hadn't died, they had just rolled over and told Carly Simon the news. Though obviously spoiled and cosseted by her own wealth, Simon doesn't seem spoiled; her reactions throughout, even meeting and marrying the drug-zombie James Taylor, are always understandable and sympathetic.
  
  Joni Mitchell isn't sympathetic per se, but she has the integrated personality of the genius totally in love with herself and obsessed with her own reflection, so she's great in a special way. Weller pokes amused fun at Mitchell's vanity and enormous self-esteem, but we get the picture that, in her opinion at any rate, Mitchell actually is pretty f--ing amazing. Does our society have it in for women who want to be artists? Mitchell's encounter with the aged, reclusive Georgia O'Keeffe seems like a emblem of a certain baton-passing, as is Carly Simon's relationship with former First Lady Jackie Kennedy. Weller is OK about male-female relationships, but in this book at any rate she's more interested in the ways women deal with each other.
  
  It's nearly a biography of five people, not just three, as there is so much about James Taylor you will never need to read another word about him if you have this book on your shelf; and for some reason there's tons of material about Judy Collins. I wonder if Weller proposed a book with King, Mitchell, Simon, and Collins, and some editorial board nixed the addition of Collins--but there was so much good material about Collins, Weller kept it in anyhow. She is the Vanity Fair writer supreme, whose motto is that no sentence is complete without some action and punch, and the best way to get that is to string along many words with hyphens to invent new forms of adjectival excitement. You won't be able to read for more than a few minutes without being hit on the head by Weller's mad stylings--here's a typical hyphenfilled sentence about the Eagles: "Their at-home-in-Death-Valley image and bleating-lost-boy-in-expensive-boots sound had become era-definingly successful." (Ten hyphens in a mere 20 words! Sheila Weller is era-definingly successful at inventing a new form of writing--like the classic circus act when a small VW would pull up to center ring and then clown after clown would prance out. Then more clowns--then still more. She's pretty amazing and GIRLS LIKE US is a book that, for all its flaws, convinces us roundly in its larger arguments and dazzles with its wide-ranging portraits of artistic life in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
  
  

• Excellent read

  
  By A2OKJDFD3B936W on 2008-04-09
  I have read only the Carole King and Carly Simon sections of the book at this point, a singer per night. With the section on Carly Simon, the book seems more a compendium of information that I have read or heard in other books or in interviews with Simon herself. She has been pretty open about her life. With Carole King's section, the reader will finally get a chance to see more than the gaurded persona that King to this day presents. She can be eloquent about the environment, relate the same stories about working in the Brill Building cubicles, or her fear of a bomb (herself) at her first Troubador act, but that is about all she has told in countless interviews over the last fifteen years with the release of City Streets. I was astounded at how troubled a life she has lead. Gerry Goffin, Rick Evers, and Rick Sorenson all took her down a different path of pain and depression, themes in her music she recently refused to acknowledge in a PBS interview (My music is about perservance..."You can do anything"). Only Charley Larkey comes off as being somewhat decent. I also do not agree with the writer's idea that Larkey was not a good musician. His bass playing was excellent and elemental in King's early records. Goffin comes off as a troubled, philandering, abusive, neglectful husband until Carole left him. He then became angry that she would have the nerve to do so. Luckily, without his lyrics, Carole wrote songs such as "Home Again," "So far away," and "You've Got a Friend;" and with Toni Stern, "It's too late." The section that is most disturbing is King's relationship with drug addict Rick Evers, a physically abusive sycophant, for whom Carole wrote "Golden Man." Weiler should have known that Carole started singing this in concerts in 1976 with the Thoroughbred tour but attibutes the song to Carole's fourth husband Rick Sorenson. Also in this book, are pages of Carole's ease with creating music, dealing with other musicians, and writing some of the most loved songs of the last fifty years, reflecting much more the pain and sorrow of her life than many of us could imagine. As my mother, a trained opera singer, said about Carole's music, "Even the happiest of her music has a thread of sadness." There's no wonder. If you're a Carole King fan, as I obviously am, the book is a great read.
  
  

• Why Carole, Joni and Carly Still Matter

  
  By A13E0ARAXI6KJW on 2008-04-10
  My immediate thought when I read this comprehensive three-fold biography was Allison Anders' evocative but episodic 1996 Grace of My Heart, a fictionalized biopic of Carole King's career in the 1960's. Similar to the approach taken with the movie, author Sheila Weller covers more than the music of the times but also the constraining era in which they all came of age. When King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon were growing up (they were born within four years of each other), women were either placed in traditional homemaker roles or relegated to a cultural abyss if they dared to pursue artistic professions. In an often dishy but nonetheless enlightening book, Weller does an admirable job surveying the times when these three singer-songwriters first emerged and crossed paths on their way to popular mainstream success.
  
  Their backgrounds could not be more different. King was a middle-class Brooklyn native who grew up listening to classical music and Broadway show tunes, while Mitchell was a dyed-in-the-wool bohemian poet who moved from the Canadian prairies to Greenwich Village and later Laurel Canyon. Born in privilege to a family ensconced in publishing (Simon & Schuster), Simon was a rich girl who went the folk singer route with her older sister Lucy. Even though each persevered against the going mindset and managed professional success on a measured level (and in King's case, quite a portfolio of Brill Building hits co-written with first husband Gerry Goffin), each ultimately created a work that provided a turning point in their careers. King had 1971's mega-selling Tapestry, Mitchell had 1971's intensely personal Blue, and Simon had 1972's No Secrets featuring her signature song about a former lover, "You're So Vain". The author documents all this with relish and delves into the inspirations for their music.
  
  The dishier parts of the book deal with the women's checkered love lives. King married four times, while Mitchell and Simon each went through a succession of liaisons that obviously shaped many of their compositions. Aside from the tawdry impact of Warren Beatty's legendary womanizing, James Taylor appears to be the common intersection as he befriended King (and turned her epochal song, "You've Got a Friend" into a Grammy Award-winning hit), had an extended affair with Mitchell and eventually married Simon for eleven turbulent, drug-filled years. However, all three have weathered the storm of their personal lives and the ever-changing tastes of the public to become grandmothers and songsmiths for another generation. Weller writes in true baby boomer fashion with an alternating sense of reverence and ribaldry about three icons deserving of such a tribute.
  
  

• A pick..... with a dose of measured pan

  
  By A2BHZZXVMKPAYH on 2008-04-12
  " Girls Like Us" seems to be striking a chord with those who lived through the turbulent, yet enlightening, times of the late 60s/early 70s. The stories of these three women seem ripe for regaling the generation who laughed, cried, and, most importantly, identified with the art produced by the subjects Shelia Weller explores. In my case, some of it happens to intrigue a Gen Xer who grew up listening to these women through my own discovery..... no college dorm room sing-alongs brought me to the alter of Joni Mitchell ( my favorite of the three), nor the undeniable talent of Carole King and Carly Simon. I sought them on my own, as an indivdual, not part of a movement.
  
  Having said this, the status of being removed from the zeitgeist of the Boomers gives me an advantage and, perhaps, a disadvantage. I feel I can look at these artists with a more objective view than those who moved through life with them. On the flip, there is a definite disconnect between my understanding of the times, as I was not there, and the visceral knowledge brought to the book by the target audience.
  
  Weller does a fantastic job of providing a historical backdrop for each story she tells. Motives, blow by blow accounts, tidbits that have escaped the pop culture pantheon, even though two out of three of these women ( Mitchell and Simon) have been turned inside out by the media, one of them courting it ( Simon) while the other one has avoided it at all costs ( Mitchell). New details are revealed, especially with the story of Carole King, a figure who has always generously shared her talent, yet remained detached from the media machine that is usually necessary for promoting one's work. Weiler obviously did her homework, uncovering elements of the stories we have not yet heard, although there is a fair amount of rehashing tales long ago plumbed by different outlets.
  
  The real question, though , is not whether Weller did a good job in compiling a historical, documentary style book explaining these three women, their art and their personas. The answer to this question is, for the most part, yes. However, the bigger question is when will the public ever be able to separate their interest in the art from a fascination with the artist, seemingly needing to know the intimate details of their lives? It is interesting, I admit, to know who inspired what songs, what circumstances sparked the creation of a certain piece. Still, two of the three women explored here ( Mitchell and King) may take issue with some of the information that is now available for public consumption. I fear we cease to respect our artists when we have such voracious appetites for knowing every aspect of their personal lives. I am guilty of partaking, it's just a thought for us to consider as we devour the joys and tragedies of the talents we claim to honor.
  
  
  
  
  
• Great Subject, terrible book
  By A1R6UHT1UOM03E on 2008-04-30
  I bought this book because I'm a woman of this generation of artists. Joni Mitchell and Carole King defined my life from age 18 to 30, and maybe even after that. Carly Simon is kind of a lesser talent, and a much lesser influence, on women my age, I think.
  
  The author is a very poor writer, and whoever edited this book needs to be bounced. It reads like "Entertainment Tonight", and it is very often difficult to follow a sentence from beginning to end without scratching your head and trying to figure out what is being said.
  
  I'm not sorry I bought the book, as the fascinating information on the subjects is worth it, but be prepared for a difficult read to get to the good stuff.
  
  
• Not Necessarily the Girls You Think You See
  By A5TPOR51VWE6L on 2008-04-17
  I grew up with Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. I played their songs on the piano and guitar and wanted to be like them. I envied them their poise, grace, and talent. After reading this book, though, my eyes have been opened to the painful lives these three women endured. To the public, their lives seemed magical. In private, their lives were sometimes hell.
  
  Carole King suffered the infidelities of her first husband, the indifference of her second husband, the severe drug addiction and death of her third husband, and bizarre anti-social behavior from her fourth husband. In between all this heartache, she had to prove herself in a man's world and sometimes minimize her abilities in an effort to shield her husbands from feeling inferior.
  
  Joni Mitchell spent so many years mourning the child she'd given up for adoption that her success didn't always seem to be enough. Joni did her fair share of lovin' 'em and leavin' 'em, but she had her heart broken many times and the episode with Jackson Browne is particularly enlightening because it's the only time she lost faith in herself. Her version of what happened between them confirms some of the other stories of abuse women have had at his hands. Joni's talent is so immense that she went beyond us with her later works. Joni continued to evolve while we remained static.
  
  Carly Simon has always been open about her phobias and this book doesn't sugar-coat them. A bit of the golden shine was taken from her marriage with James Taylor, though, after reading of their dysfunctional relationship fueled by his drug addiction. For example, James preferred to drive his mistress to the airport instead of being at his son's bedside during major surgery.
  
  The juxtaposition of the careers of Carole, Joni, and Carly with the advances in the women's movement and the resulting recognition in the workplace is interesting. The unfortunate aspect is that, while they enjoyed the advantages of coming up in the 60's and 70's, women are now having some of the privileges gradually taken away, bit by bit.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Lame Sentimentality from select NY zip codes
  By A13FBTZ8SO8T3D on 2008-04-29
  Written like a fanzine, or worse, article for VOGUE, this book is a sentimental and nostalgic walk down memory lane where vicarious validation via conspicuous consumption is the order of the day. And it gets it wrong for the most part, especially in terms of musical legacy.
  To begin with, no one, and I mean no one, ever took Carly Simon seriously. That was music for spoiled girls from West Chester County and Long Island, and absolutely no one else. I can't feel their pain when their real estate loses value, and the fact that Simon was an heiress whose most salient assets were right up front immediately undercuts any weight she hoped to achieve. Apart from marrying another singer songwriter of secondary and ephemeral influence, although one who endeared himself to more than one college girl of the 70's, there is little of consequence to Simon's professional career. Bedmates were never enough to land her on the same side of the artistic hemisphere as Mitchell, or for that matter King.
  The book is quite passionate about King, and I'm happy for King that she gets the props here, but, she too was essentailly a one or two hit wonder with little credibilty after Tapestry. Yes, that was a major record in its day, and King was always exactly what she purported to be. To that extent, her integrity remains intact, and Tapestry will always be something more significant than a guilty pleasure. Her influence is likely to be most evidently seen in the likes of Ani DiFranco. Who else? Not really sure, but she and her daughter did have a nice jeans ad a few years back. There is a lot of paper in this book dedicated to King, and it is well worth the read. But when it is all said and done, King was a Brill Building writer, not unlike Neil Diamond. The legacy she leaves behind is one squarely framed in pop music from NYC. It is of its time and of its place.
  And that brings us to Mitchell. This is not the definitive tome on the Canadian artist. In fact, it falls far from that, and its failure to measure up to its subject is what finally casts this book in the fanzine cut-out pile. Mitchell was not like girls from NY zipcodes nor many other US zipcodes. Her quintessential Canadian nature is as integral to her work as it is for Gordon Lightfoot. To lump her into a generational time warp is as much a disservice to her art and to the complexities of her integrity as anything a record company did. Joni was different from everybody. In a very big way. Her compositional skills, her chord construction, her compensation for the polio she suffered, her intimacies with CSN, her comaraderie with Young, her paintings and business decisions all reflect a part of a very complex artist who paid dearly for fame. Miles Davis understood her intuitively. Herbie Hancock as well. Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius were in awe of her prodigious command of her muse. Mitchell was no pop song writer. The story of giving up and then reuniting with her daughter and grandchildren is well known by now, and while that brings Mitchell back down from Olympus for most of us, truth is this book never really gets to why Mitchell was so iconic. That study is still to be written. Maybe by Hancock.
  For a book that purports to spotlight a few popstars to validate how and why the women of a certain period were "all that", this fails. The author might have been better served zeroing in on Raitt, Joplin, Slick, Aretha, Emmy Lou: they were far more influential to the music world and far more influential culturally than either Simon or King. And my experioence with my friends is that there were far more women who felt a kinship with these other artists.
  
  
• It's The Economy
  By A3RNP5X8ZGZIEI on 2008-04-22
  "Girls Like Us," a new triple-headed biography of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon, by New York Times bestselling author Sheila Weller, weighs in at 530 pages, plus pictures, plus notes, and what an effort it must represent. Weller, an experienced journalist who specializes in popular culture, has clearly dug deep, and interviewed many, in limning the lives of these three significant female figures in the music of the latter 20th century. And, from first word to last, she has a thesis: that their music changed lives, particularly women's. Nor can there be any doubt that this trio of artists lived and worked through the great contemporaneous feminist movement. And, by the way, that they're now all grandmothers!
  
  Carole King was born Carol Klein in Brooklyn, in spring, 1942 (I, too, was born in Brooklyn: however, she's a few months younger than me.) By the age of 18 she was already a songwriting married woman and mother, and success came early. She and her husband at the time, Gerry Goffin, were based in New York's Brill Building, famed home of most popular songwriters for a decade or two. In the late 1950's, early 1960's, the pair penned some of nascent rock and roll's earliest, biggest hits. "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," for the Shirelles; "He's So Fine," for the Chiffons; one of the greatest of New York songs, "Up on the Roof," for the Drifters. Also, "The Loco-Motion," "Something Tells Me I'm into Something Good," a bouncy hit I've always liked, for the English group, Herman's Hermits; even "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman," surely a natural wonder, for Aretha Franklin; and "He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss," a song I've always hated, for the Cookies. Then King moved on, became a Los Angeles lady of the canyon, Laurel, I think --and in the early 1970's released "Tapestry," a monster, greatly-influential album that broke many sales records. Me, I fell in love with rock and roll, as introduced by Allan Freed on New York radio, early, at about age 12, with "Life Could Be a Dream," and I have many - most--of these early hits, as done by the original groups, in my collection. I always particularly loved girl group sounds; Weller identifies the Shirelles and the Chantels as the earliest successful girl groups, and I have both their records. But I don't have a single Carole King record per se, and not only don't I own "Tapestry," I've never even heard it. Was living in the United Kingdom at the time of its release, and whereas they speak English over there, and the record sold very well, it didn't interest me: too reductionist for my taste.
  
  Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson, of Nordic background, on the vast Canadian prairie. She, like King, felt herself stardom-bound, from a young age, this time as a folksinger. She was, helpfully, a beautiful blonde, and she achieved stardom as a folksinger/songwriter, in the early 60's. This was the greatest era for folk music of the 20th century, when Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Judy Collins, among others, were bursting into stardom. Mitchell wrote "Clouds," and "The Circle Game" early, also relocated to LA and became a "Lady of the Canyon." She continued to write; deeply personal songs at first, then, in the 70's, less so. She, too, was too reductionist for my taste; I bought my first Joni Mitchell record just a year or two ago.
  
  Carly Simon is somewhat younger than Weller's other two subjects: she was born into a wealthy, intellectual, influential Manhattan family: her Jewish father was a partner in important publishing company Simon & Schuster. Simon is, of course, one long-legged, well-educated, classy girl; she married James Taylor, another folkie star, in the 1970's and had several big hits, "Anticipation;" and the feminist favorites "I Always Thought That's the Way It Should Be;" "You're So Vain." Will I surprise you by saying I have none of her records? Too reductionist?
  
  Weller has amassed a wealth of detail about her three subjects, and there's primo gossip to be found here. Simon became close friends with Jackie Kennedy Onassis; we're told that American aristocrat Onassis didn't mind using a Porto-San with the hoi polloi when necessary. From our reading, we must conclude that James Taylor was a boy who really got around. Weller tells us he had a thing with Joni Mitchell, and mentions that he also hung with Carole King. But it sure feels as if all three women fell in love every Tuesday; and ultimately, I wearied of tracking three sets of friends, lovers, husbands, and session musicians.
  
  However, my biggest problem with Weller's book is with its thesis: that these three women's songs actually changed women's lives. I grant you, they were resonant to many women, including me, who lived through it all, and some have lasted into the 21st century. But really, "Amazing Grace" is an amazingly beautiful abolitionist song that has long outlived slavery, and is still being sung. Did it kill slavery? Nope. Damage it, sure. The beautiful "We Shall Overcome;" was any song more central to the 1960's anti-segregation movement? Still being sung. But did it end segregation all by itself? And consider the "Marseillaise," French national anthem arising out of their revolution: beautiful, stirring, still being sung. But did it create that revolution? Be that as it may, at one point, Weller quotes a music business figure as saying that "it was a matter of people being guided by your music, and using it for the soundtrack of their lives." Certainly, I can agree with this more limited claim. But as to explaining what made the 60's and the woman's movement what they were?
  
  First, you had the Vietnam War. Then, development of a low-dosage anti-pregnancy pill that many women could, and did, take: for the first time in human history they could plan their lives and careers just as men could. Furthermore, during the 1960's, three major American corporations metastasized, creating thousands of their own jobs, and hundreds of thousands of support jobs elsewhere: Xerox, Internal Business Machines, and Minnesota Mining and Manufacture. For the first time in history, most girls could, and did, get jobs - and those who couldn't sold candles to their employed sisters. As James Carville so memorably put it during Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign: "It's the economy, stupid."
  
  
  
• Absolute Perfection
  By A80DRT13YA95J on 2008-04-24
  I first heard about Girls Like Us from Dennis Elsas, a DJ on WFUV radio in New York, and quickly read the Vanity Fair excerpt. I was afraid it would read like a Kitty Kelley biography, but--thankfully--I was wrong. I usually borrow most of my books from the library (sorry, Amazon), but I pre-ordered Girls and counted the days until its arrival. I've wanted to take off from work to read it. Like other reviewers have said, this is a read you won't want to put down.
  
  Girls Like Us is a thoroughly researched book about three women who were catalysts of change during a pivotal era in our nation's history. Women--and men--who lived through the 60s and early 70s will love the walk down memory lane and, a la Sex in the City where women discuss which character they're most like, women will decide whether they're a Carol, a Joni (as I am), or a Carly. Sheila Weller really earned her royalties here--plenty of juicy gossip about all three women. But more importantly, Weller gets into the artists' music, the story behind many of the songs (who knew?!), the musicians who played with them, an insider's view of the music industry. The book is worth the price just for the extensive Bibliography and Discography.
  
  I just told a friend today that Girls Like Us should be required reading for college women's history courses. If you know a woman who missed coming of age during this wonderful era, show them what they missed and gift them with a copy of Girls Like Us. Before your settle into your favorite spot with your new book, go down to the basement or up to the attic, dust off your copy of Tapestry, Blue, and Anticipation, and sing along with the girls like you.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Just okay...
  By A1EW90DHOC0AXV on 2008-04-28
  I thought that I would love this book, but.... It is certainly well researched, but the editing leaves a lot to be desired. There is too much detail about inconsequential characters and the sentence structure is often confusing to say the least. It could have been edited down by about 100 pages and been terrific, but unfortunately, I found it tedious.
  Sorry - love the ladies, did not love the book.
  
  
• Yawn.....
  By A2V7H6JM9OWAFB on 2008-05-08
  I really wanted to like this book as this was my generation and music ruled our lives. Unfortunately, the book is overwritten, confusing, and at times downright boring. Enough already with the unimportant name dropping and the New York zip codes? Where was the editor?
  
  
• Lugubrious Style
  By A10JC499XSZZNI on 2008-05-20
  I was unable to stick with this book. I think you have to be a die-hard fan of at least one of the subjects to be willing to go all the way through this prosaic text. I am not and so ended up scanning the photographs and donating it to the public library. Not worth the price, to me.
  
  
• Stayed In Bed All Morning . . .
  By A1WUPRPQBV4FB8 on 2008-06-17
  . . . just to finish reading this book. It's a long one, especially when you devour each little word contained in the many footnotes, but worth every hour spent. Reading this thorough, well-researched, and respectful biography of three notorious singer-songwriters, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, from their days as young, aspiring artists to current days as grandmothers, was like listening to their music for the first time again. I couldn't help but break out my vinyl, stored in a moving box in the attic.
  
  Sheila Weller clearly spent years gathering facts, information and quotes from those closest to these icons, (and in some cases from the women themselves), and braids the three stories together to paint a historical account of modern folk/rock/pop music. She doesn't merely regurgitate already published material from music reviews and Rolling Stone articles, but instead offers similarities and differences that made this reader appreciate the subjects as individuals as well as their contributions and reflections on the women's movement in general.
  
  A surprising ribbon running through this braid is James Taylor, who had profound yet differing relationships with all three. What also ultimately struck me about the book was how deeply interested I was at the beginning and how it merely passed the time toward the end. I think it's a direct reflection on the careers of these women: exciting, fresh, ultra-talented in the beginning. . .but in the end, it becomes a biography of ordinary--albeit ambitious--women who've led extraordinary lives while looking for love and fulfillment, and endured tremendous public scrutiny. One thing the critics in our society can't take from them is their recorded music--their true biographies--and I, for one, will listen to them sing for the rest of my life.
  
  Very well written, very well done and I certainly recommend this book to fans of these musicians (as well as James Taylor, and others like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), and to those interested in the music scene as it developed and evolved through the 1960s-1980s.
  
  Michele Cozzens is the author of It's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club
  
  
• Painful
  By A2IJ14ZZK80I0N on 2008-07-01
  Let me begin by giving credit where credit is due: this is a great idea for a book, and if you were going to write a book like this, I can't imagine assigning a researcher with any more zeal than Sheila Weller.
  Unfortunately, the poor woman simply can not write.
  Having grown up in the era described, the forced veneer of social commentary contained nothing new to me, but could be instructive for those of a more tender age. But having grown up in the era described, I can tell you that the three subjects of this book had little if any commonality in terms of either their music, or their relation to the youth/feminist cultural awakening.
  I don't want to belabor the point, but Ms. Weller must understand that there is no extra credit awarded for the greatest number of parenthetical statements, unsubstantiated conclusions, or incredibly bloated sentences.
  As has been stated in another review, the ultimate crime here is the absence of an editor--at least one familiar with the English language. The underlying structure of the book is all wrong; contined forced lurches between the three subjects is literary whiplash. The reader is much better off streaming together every third chapter to link the story of one of the individual singers. It is honestly difficult to believe that anyone associated with a sub-brand of Simon and Shuster really read this.
  Which leads to my personal conspiracy theory. Given that Carly Simon's father was one half of that publishing house, I can imagine a conversation in which the author pitched her idea for a book on Mitchell and King to an editor who answered, "not unless you also include Richard's kid--and if you do, we'll agree to print every last thing you put in your rough draft."
  And they did.
  
  
• Needed an Editor
  By A2FJ3KH822PP4V on 2008-07-27
  This books reads like it was written by someone with ADHD. It jumps from topic to topic for no reason other than the author apparently cannot control and organize her thoughts. We go from Carole to Joni to Carly and back and forth; within each section we jump from event to event; and within paragraphs and sentences we jump from topic to topic. To me, the stream-of-consciousness style did nothing to serve the author's thesis and was very distracting.
  
  Nonetheless, if you can ignore the fact the book reads like a very bad term paper, the subject matter is quite fascinating -- particularly the section on Carly Simon.
  
  
  
  
  
• So Sad This Song
  By A1IRB8UM6KTX8O on 2008-04-16
  Girls Like Us is a heartbreakingly sad book. As a Carly Simon and Carole King fan I never thought for all the honesty and warmth of their music there would be no lyrics are melodies to capture the absolute sorrow of this book.
  Carole's life has always been hidden from the public and after reading this book I wish so many things had never been revealed. I've always felt that the grace of Carole's melodies absorbed the sorrow of the lyrics. Carole has a grace I will never have or understand.
  Carly's story on the other hand has been widely told. I remember reading "I never sang for my mother" all those years ago in Vanity Fair. I was shocked by her revelations and the depth of sorrow in that article. Over the years I have been shocked by Carly's candor and have questioned her discretion, but I deeply admire her ability to "keep at it".
  Joni Mitchell on the other hand has always rubbed me the wrong way. I've always hated her sense of superiority. Although I respect her musical ability I have never been a fan, but that did not stop me from mourning with her when she gave her daughter up for adoption and the joy I felt when they were reunited all those years later.
  Girls Like Us is the final nail in the coffin for all the myths surrounding the era of the 70's female singer-songwriter.
  
  
  
• Glossy glitz
  By A2YXQZIP6DM33Z on 2008-05-10
  This book is what you'd expect from an author who has written previous books about OJ Simpson's marriage and the life of Amy Fisher. Kind of trashy with lots of sex and drugs and violence but low on the rock & roll. Sort of odd for a book about singers and musicians, but that's the way it's slanted. Oh, and throw in a few small attempts at describing what happened during the era to try to make the book meaningful.
  
  Of course, as a man ten years younger than these women, it's true I'm not really the target audience. But I've had some kind of relationship with the music of all three at some point over the years, whether it be liking Carly's voice and photos back then, or the many great pop songs Carole wrote long ago, or that Joni's Hejira remains one of my favorite albums of all time even though in general I wasn't a fan of hers at all.
  
  But this book added very little to those relationships. For its size, it's an astonishingly lightweight book. The best thing I took from it was learning who were the subjects of a few songs, and I had to wade through a lot of dreck to find that.
  
  
• All in Vain
  By A1M41U1ZKJD8YI on 2008-05-23
  Author sure did her homework--but when it came time to sit down at the keyboard, she apparently couldn't figure out exactly what to do with her hundreds (or is it thousands?) of hours of interviews.
  
  Result is a badly-structured juggling act in which she valiantly tries to keep stories of all three ladies (each of whom could warrant an individual bio) in the air but frequently drops several of the balls to go off on unimportant tangents. Clumsy run-on sentences and endless footnotes (many of them fascinating factoids in and of themselves--but distracting nonetheless) make this a tough read for any but the most ardent fans of the title trio.
  
  
• Maybe you had to be there, but
  By A1K7D2GQQKR3GR on 2008-05-09
  I found this book fascinating. Far more than just the story of the 3 women
  (King, Mitchell,Simon) it is a story of the whole rock scene from the 60s
  to present. You really don't have to be a hard core fan of any of these three singers to enjoy their stories. Someone you knew and liked will show up at some point.
  
  
  
• Didn't live up to the hype
  By AIA88JB33K4G9 on 2008-06-25
  This book was entertaining and interesting, but only if you are hard-core fans of the three women it is about. The jacket proclaims it is also the "Journey of a Generation"...not really. It reads like a glorifed People article.
  
  It should be telling that not one of the women the book was written about gave an interview to the author. Also like others have commented, there are parts where important things are mentioned and then never touched on again, and the reverse, some fact is casually mentioned as if an entire previous chapter had been written about it leaving you wondering, "Did I miss something?"
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Patchwork that is big on sizzle and short on substance
  By AKPYS9VSM3LNX on 2008-07-08
  In a way, this is a very odd idea for a book. Aside from the fact that all of these people are women and singer/songwriters, there is little that unites them. As a result, there is a patchwork quality to this book. The author goes from one singer to another and back again. You feel as a reader like you're the passenger in a car where the driver doesn't really know how to use a stick shift. There is a lot of lurching.
  
  Most of the focus on the book is not on these women as artists, but which famous people they slept with. Since Ms. Simon apparently has slept with a tremendous number of famous men, Girls Like Us is best when focusing on her. At the other end of the spectrum, the author can't seem to get much of a handle on Carole King. Joni Mitchell falls somewhere in between.
  
  If you want to know more than just about their sex lives and love affairs and get to the real heart of the matter - the music of these women - this book comes up short. There is very little insight here as to the art of their songwriting. What motivates these people to do what they do? What were they thinking when they wrote their classic songs? These are the kinds of questions that the author does not possess the depth to answer.
  
  The tone of the book is very girlie and chatty. It's like eavesdropping on a coffee shop conversation with some fifty-something year old women dishing the dirt about relationships and sex lives. If you're a woman, maybe this tone is fine. For me, it was a distraction.
  
  In essence, this book is a beach read for female boomers. It's full of well-researched celebrity gossip. To her credit, the author does treat the subjects with respect. She also knows how to write a sentence. But if you want to truly get inside the head of any of these songwriters, you'll have to look elsewhere.
  
  
• I love this book!
  By A3KDROJV8PTIQG on 2008-04-29
  Wow, I just finished "Girls Like Us". I loved every page of it and highly recommend it. Its about three amazing women, but it reveals a lot about our culture too. You couldn't make these stories up, it really recreates the headiness and newfound freedom of the world they helped forge, along with all the dangers that were part of the package.
  The book is full of things I did not know about the lives of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. Everything is here, the music, the personal history, and the love lives that were so intertwined with their art. It is a close up view of three living legends.
  The books reminds us how tough it was for each of the three women to face the hurdles of the times, both in the music industry and their personal lives. I had forgotten what it was really like for all of us in those years. And, that reality informed the choices we all made. It was indeed the journey of a generation, as the title suggests.
  This book is meticulously researched, well written, and totally engrossing.
  I have ordered six copies, for myself and for birthday gifts for my close friends. Before I could mail it to her, one of them called to tell me she was reading a book that I have to get immediately, sure enough it was "Girls Like Us." So, I decided to give that copy to a young friend who is in college and who loves music. I suspect this book will fascinate her. Its not just the stories of the three women's lives, although that is fascinating reading. It's the way the author, Sheila Weller, weaves them all together, making it a much bigger story that still resonates today. I suspect a lot more of us will be giving and getting this book this year, its a book about old friends, and its a real gift to be able to meet them again in such a vivid personal portrait.
  
  
• Bring Something Else to the Beach
  By A2GFDZTGPZL51N on 2008-05-23
  Most of the reviews for this book seem to fall into one of two categories: those who loved it, and those who wanted to love it but were disappointed.
  I fall into the latter category. For those of us who are big fans of this trio of women, disappointment in love is not unknown!
  At the risk of sounding repetitious, I had the following issues with this book: way too many footnotes (a separate book could be created from them) - rambling, twisty, hard-to-follow sentences - too many unimportant detours and side stories. While there were a few choice nuggets to be found, it wasn't worth the effort of slogging through this LONG book. I could have lived without knowing who Joni's song "Carey" was about, and I still don't know who Carly accused of being so vain!
  
  
• Just Plain Annoying
  By A324ZRPQ6P2Z0 on 2008-06-21
  This is the first time I have ever been encouraged to comment on a book purchased through Amazon. But it is also the first time I have felt my money was taken under false pretenses.
  I thought I was purchasing a book about three very acccomplished singer/songwriters.Two of whom are in my top five of all time. I thought that perhaps I would come to understand and learn a little as to what inspired such brilliant works of creativity.
  Like many, I suspect, I knew some anecdotes about their history.
  But on starting to read, I realised that the tone of this book seemed to be more about the authors own political bias and how she could trumpet her views which were inspired, in part, by her exposure to three strong independant women.In short. I felt I was reading a Lite Feminist Manifesto.
  Now, there is nothing wrong with these views. They are just as valid as millions of others.
  But, I wanted to read a book about Creators of some of my favourite music and not a book about Right Wing Feminism.I say right Wing, because the author constantly re-inforced steriotypes that all men are Wife Beaters, Non committal and insensitive and responsible for every unfortunate decision that a women makes.
  She is entitled to hold these views. I don't share them and as a result the book was annoying and difficult to read. I struggled to finish it and regretted doing so.
  Now before the extreme politically minded get too upset,I am aware that the book was to have some relevance to Feminism and that these three individuals were inspirational to the movement. But, it dominates the book to such an extent that, I imagine, it alienates a goodly proportion of the prospective readership.
  Perhaps the book should come with a warning that it is not so much about Carole, Joan and Carly but that it is more about the author's own political views, contextualised by her historical exposure to these three inspirational women.
  I would then have waited for a truly impartial and factual Auto/Biography to spend my money on.
  
  
• Where was the Editor?
  By A15A1G80TLIB7F on 2008-07-06
  I was so excited to hear about this book, however, after slogging through 91 pages, I am giving up. I am sure there are gems of information somewhere in here but I am unwilling to look any further. It's as if someone published the first draft with no editing . . . ever. I find myself laughing outloud at the sentence structure and the length of those sentences; having to backtrack and re-read a passage to get the meaning. It is hard to know sometimes when Ms. Weller is talking about which singer, although having a different typeset for each individual is helpful, if a bit of an affectation. Save your money and wait until it comes out in video form; at least then there will be lots of pictures and music to go with the information.
  
  
• Sing Along with Mitchell & Carole & Carly
  By A28GEIVP5KQMZU on 2008-07-28
  If you're old enough to have been singing along with the "Girls Like Us" - Carole King, Joni Mitchell & Carly Simon - , then you are probably old enough to remember the TV program *Sing Along with Mitch* (Miller and his gang.) In that TV program, probably a precursor of karaoke, there were words printed on your TV screen and you would "follow the bouncing ball" that bounced merrily along on top of the words as each was being sung.
  
  Sheila Weeler's book on the "girls" needs a bouncing ball to keep track of where she is, and which "girl" is doing what with which boy (often men were serialized through the gambit of the "girls.")
  
  Loosely chronologically organized by "girl"- e.g. a beginning chapter on each, then "Carole: 1961 - 1964," "Joni: 1961 - Early 1965," Carly 1961 - Late 1965," then Coming Around Again to "Carole: 1964 - Early 1969," "Joni: March 1965 - December 1967," Carly 1965 - 1969" etc.etc., the book chronicles the saga of these singer/songwriters in the context of the times - sometimes to great length - almost ad nauseum, and sometimes to short shrift. Weller is at her worst when she pretends to be a music critic and starts opining her own (often odd) meaning to the now-interwoven-tapestry-of-our-own-lives words "the girls" wrote and sang.
  
  Over-all the book is informative, sometimes to too-oft repeated choruses due to Weller's "organization*" of the material, and sometimes downright mystifying - as when the reader is told that James Taylor thought Carly was messin' around with Mick because of Jagger's guest appearance "adding his unmistakable cracking voice" on the "Don't you? Don't you?"s in the recording of *You're So Vain.* This reviewer has gone back and relistened to YSV repeatedly, & I can't find Mick! Maybe because my Momma was right and listening to all that loud music really *DID* ruin my hearing?
  ;-) /TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer
  
  * There is no bouncing ball, but there is a poorly organized index in the back.
  
  
• Sadly disappointing
  By A3UFO3OZH3VXTA on 2008-08-01
  I have never written a "bad" review on Amazon-when I write a review I do so both to acknowledge the author's accomplishment and to alert other readers to a potentially enjoyable book.
  
  So I debated quite a bit before writing this but I would hate to see others spend their money for this book without being forewarned.
  
  What a great concept for a book!!!! For those of us who grew up in that era, a book about Joni, Carole and Carly is such a captivating subject. And the author clearly had done significant research not just in uncovering so much detail about the three singer songwriters but also truly capturing the era both from the perspective of the music scene and the changing role of women at that time in history.
  
  Two factors, however, made this book the most difficult, unenjoyable reading experience that I have had in recent memory. First of all, the organization of the book was incredibly confusing and difficult to follow. Chapters jumped from person to person in the loosest of chronological order making following each women's story near impossible. I was constantly shifting back and forth trying to piece the information together in some logical pattern. Worse than the structure, though, was the actual writing. Sentences went on forever. Thoughts, references and opinions were jumbled together randomly with no apparent connection. Rather than finding the footnotes helpful, I found them distracting and incomplete. Where were the editors for this book? It is hard to imagine that this book was allowed to be released without someone questioning the convoluted, heavy writing and structure.
  
  I brought this book on vacation so had several hours at a time to read. Frankly, it unfortunately became a chore rather than a pleasure but I was determined to finish and can report that not only did the book not improve, but the author rushed through the later years so quickly that I did not feel a sense of closure.
  
  Truly a disappointment.
  
  
  
  
• It didn't have a good beat and I couldn't really dance to it
  By A2VZMFEK2TUMLS on 2008-09-10
  I have never seen writing quite like this. Others have mentioned the mile-long sentences, the paranthetical digressions that rip apart sentences and paragraphs on almost every page and the general herky-jerky nature of the narrative. All true. But what really got to me were the author's strange use of strange new adverbs ("pioneeringly," "karmically," "welcomely," etc.) and the overuse of hyphenated composite adjectives. Surprisedly, I began keeping a list of these in-contemprary-American-English-unfound expressions. For some this might seem like nit-picking, but I don't think I've ever read a book in which the writing itself intruded so much on my experience of reading. By the time I was reading about "mountain-life-idled Carol," I was beginning to feel like "Weller-writing-addled" Daniel!
  
  But it wasn't just the writing. Others have pointed out the excessive attention paid to who was sleeping with whom, and the fact that the author did not interview two of the main subjects of the book. The latter really is a problem and at times the book reads like a series of short biographies of people you have never heard of who had some passing acquaintance with one of the three subjects. In general, there is a lot of irrelevant information and I thought the author had an unfortunate tendency to name-drop. For example, in a book about these three women, you would expect to see attention paid to James Taylor. But why do we need to know that some other girlfriend of Taylor later went on to date Woody Allen and other celebrities? Who cares? Likewise, it seems like everyone mentioned in the book who went to Harvard - no matter how fleeting the reference or how irrelevant to the context - is identified as "Harvard educated." Now, I know there is a class and priviledge argument being made about Carly Simon, but who cares if the bass player who intruduced Carol King to some musician or other went to Harvard? You have the feeling that the first questions in every interview were: "What celebrities have you slept with?" and "Did you go to an Ivy League school?"
  
  More fundamentally, though, the premise of the book is a little forced. The women are very different artists. Joni Mitchell was never a Top 40 hit-maker like Carly Simon and early-70's Carol King. When those two women were riding high on the charts, Mitchell was already artsy counter-culture by comparison. And the author does very little to explore her significance in popular music, relying instead on period reviews and cliches about Mitchell's career. A more interesting group of subjects would perhaps have been Laura Nyro, Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones. But then the whole sex-partner overlap story would have been out the window.
  
  For readers born after 1980, the book might make some interesting connections between pop music and wider cultural history. Otherwise, though, the cultural history here is pretty superficial. The 50s folk scene was dominated by men. Well, sure. The sexual revolution was a mixed blessing for women. Yep, read about that too.
  
  Still, I read the book from beginning to end and was never seriously tempted to put it down. (If I hadn't been reading it on my Kindle, though, I would have thrown it across the room a few times!) Once I decided to take absolutely everything in it with a grain of salt, I just let it happen. My main interest was in Joni Mitchell and I think the treatment of her work was probably the weakest in the book. But I found the discussion of Carol King's environmental activism in Idaho surprising and quite interesting.
  
  So, I cannot recommend that you not read it, but you should go into it with your eyes open.
  
  
• Gossipy and informative
  By A1NCCWFXM0W77X on 2008-04-22
  Some of the writing is a bit clunky, but if you really like all three singers, this is must-have book. It's interesting that only Carly Simon cooperated with the author, because there's is so much detail about King and Mitchell, too. The details of King's life are really interesting - of the three, her personal life is probably the least known. The author really captured the unique qualities - songwriting, singing, and mapping out their careers - of each of them. I think this would be an informative book for younger women who weren't fortunate enough to hear these musicians at the start of their careers. For those of us who did, and followed their musical evolution avidly, it's gratifying to see that they are all still using their creativity to make new musical connections. The author clearly respects her subjects. Oh, James Taylor makes many appearances, too.
  
  

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