PREFACE
PREFACE
I refuse to acknowledge time, famously so. I’ve made a lot of jokes and memes about it,but it’s a very real belief for me. I cried on my eighteenth birthday. I thought I was afailure because I didn’t have a record deal yet. That was my only goal. It was as if I washolding my breath until I could hold a physical thing, an album that had “Mariah Carey”
printed on it. Once I got my deal I exhaled, and my life began. From that day on, Icalculated my life through albums, creative experiences, professional accomplishments,and holidays. I live Christmas to Christmas, celebration to celebration, festive moment tofestive moment, not counting my birthdays or ages. (Much to the chagrin of certainpeople.)
Life has made me find my own way to be in this world. Why ruin the journey bywatching the clock and the ticking away of years? So much happened to me before anyoneeven knew my name, time seems like an inadequate way to measure or record it. Notliving based on time also became a way to hold on to myself, to keep close and keep alivethat inner child of mine. It’s why I gravitate toward enduring characters like Santa Claus,the Tooth Fairy, and Tinker Bell. They remind me we can be timeless.
It is a waste of time to be fixated on time. Often time can be bleak, dahling, so whychoose to live in it? Life is about the moments we create and remember. My memory is asacred place, one of the few things that belong entirely to me. This memoir is a collectionof the moments that matter, the moments that most accurately tell the story of who I am,according to me. It will move back and forth, up and down, moment to moment, adding upto the meaning of me now.
But then again, who’s counting?

PART I WAYWARD CHILD-AN INTENTION
PART I
WAYWARD CHILD
AN INTENTION
My intention was to keep her safe, but perhaps I have only succeeded in keeping herprisoner.
For many years, she’s been locked away inside of me—always alone, hidden in plainsight before masses of people. There’s significant evidence of her in my early work: oftenshe can be found looking out of windows, dwarfed by a giant frame, barefoot, staring at anempty rope swing swaying from a lone tree against a purple dusk sky. Or else she’s twostories up in a brownstone, watching the neighborhood children dancing on the sidewalkbelow. She’s shown up in a school auditorium in OshKosh overalls, holding a ball on thesidelines, waiting and wanting to be chosen. Sometimes she is caught in a rare moment ofjoy, on a roller coaster or flying by on skates with her hands in the air. Always she lingers,though, as a dull longing just behind my eyes. She’s been scared and alone for so long,and yet through all the darkness, she’s never lost her light. She has made herself knownthrough my songs—her yearning heard over the airwaves or seen on screens. Millions ofpeople know of her, but have never known her.
She is little Mariah, and much of this will be her story, as she saw it.
Some of my earliest memories are of violent moments. Because of that, I have alwayscarried a heavy blanket with which I cover up large pieces of my childhood. It has been aburden. But I can no longer stand the weight of that blanket and the silence of the little girlsmothering beneath it. I am a grown woman now, with a little girl and boy of my own. Ihave seen, I have been scared, I have been scarred, and I have survived. I have used mysongs and voice to inspire others and to emancipate my adult self. I offer this book, inlarge part, to finally emancipate that scared little girl inside of me. It is time to give her avoice, to let her tell her story exactly as she experienced it.
Though you cannot dispute someone’s lived experience, without a doubt, details inthis book will differ from the accounts of my family, friends, and plenty of folks whothink they know me. I’ve lived that conflict for far too long, and I’m weary of that too.
I’ve held my hand over the mouth of that little girl in an attempt to protect others. Even“those others” who never tried to protect me. Despite my efforts to “be above it all,” I stillgot dragged and sued and ripped off. In the end, I only hurt her more, and it almost killedme.
This book is a testimony to the resilience of silenced little girls and boys everywhere:
To insist that we believe them. To honor their experiences and tell their stories.
To set them free.
PART I WAYWARD CHILD-EXISTENCE
EXISTENCE
Early on, you face
The realization you don’t
Have a space
Where you fit in
And recognize you
Were born to exist
Standing alone
—“Outside”
There was a time in my early childhood when I didn’t believe I was worthy of being alive.
I was too young to contemplate ending my life but just old enough to know I hadn’t begunliving nor found where I belonged. Nowhere in my world did I see anyone who lookedlike me or reflected how I felt inside.
There was my mother, Patricia, with paler skin and straighter hair, and my father,Alfred Roy, with deeper skin and kinkier hair, and neither had faces with features just likemine. I saw them both as riddled with regret, hostages of a sequence of cruelcircumstances. My sister, Alison, and brother, Morgan, were both older and darker, andnot just in terms of the hues of their skin, though they were slightly browner. The two ofthem had a similar energy that seemed to block light. They had an approach to the worldthat made little room for whimsy and fantasy, which was my natural tendency. We sharedcommon blood, yet I felt like a stranger among them all, an intruder in my own family.
I was always so scared as a little girl, and music was my escape. My house was heavy,weighed down with yelling and chaos. When I sang, in a whispery tone, it calmed medown. I discovered a quiet, soft, light place inside my voice—a vibration in me thatbrought me sweet relief. My whisper-singing was my secret lullaby to myself.
But in singing I also found a connection to my mother, a Juilliard-trained opera singer.
As I listened to her doing vocal exercises at home, the repetition of the scales felt like amantra, soothing my frightened little mind. Her voice went up and down and up and upand up—and something inside me rose along with it. (I would also sing along with thebeautiful, angelic, soulful Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” and follow her voice up intothe clouds.) I would sing little tunes around the house, to my mother’s delight. And shealways encouraged me. One day, while practicing an aria from the opera Rigoletto, shekept stumbling on this one part. I sang it back to her, in perfect Italian. I might have beenthree years old. She looked at me, stunned, and at that moment I knew she saw me. I wasmore than a little girl to her. I was Mariah. A musician.
My father taught me to whistle before I could talk. I had a raspy speaking voice eventhen, and I liked that I sounded different from most other kids my age. My singing voice,on the other hand, was smooth and strong. One day, when I was around eight years old, Iwas walking down the street with my friend Maureen, who had porcelainlike skin withwarm brown hair and a sweet face like Dorothy’s from The Wizard of Oz. She was one ofthe few little white girls in the neighborhood who was allowed to play with me. As wewalked, I began to sing something. She stopped suddenly, frozen in place on the sidewalk.
She listened for a moment in silence, standing very still. Finally, she turned to me andsaid, in a clear and steady voice, “When you sing it sounds like there are instruments withyou. There’s music all around your voice.” She said it like a proclamation, almost like aprayer.
They say God speaks through people, and I will always be grateful for my littlegirlfriend speaking into my heart that day. She saw something special in me and gave itwords, and I believed her. I believed my voice was made of instruments—piano, strings,and flutes. I believed my voice could be music. All I needed was someone to see and hearme.
I saw how my voice could make other people feel something good inside, somethingmagical and transformative. That meant not only was I not unworthy, valid as a person,but I was valuable. Here was something of value that I could bring to others—the feeling.
It was the feeling I would pursue for a lifetime. It gave me a reason to exist.