GIRLS LIKE US
Sheila Weller
C Kellwell Inc
Atria Books Division of Simon and Shuster
QUICK REVIEW by CHRISTINE TRZYNA
Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King, perhaps the three most influential singer-songwriters of 20th century popular music; they reflected and influenced pop culture through their unconventional lives and original music that so very many of us still sing in the shower. While Carole embodied the Jewish earth mother who kept her children and family life apart from her career, Carly was the vampish sex positive intellectual with the (frequently) true heart who wasn't always sure she wanted a career. Joni decided early that her creativity would prevail over personal relationships but her angst over giving up her long secret love child for adoption was the underlying theme that effected both profoundly.
OK so guess who made it through all three ladies' lives? That Lothario James Taylor! (I can see you now going right to the index to read the specific parts about James....)
So which lady is most interesting to me? Probably Carly.
But since this book follows the three women through their lives as expressing the challenges of a generation of women, lets go to page 292-293 where we read this....
"On the one hand, being an old lady, or a "lady" - the kind of arty, sensual, esoterically spiritual chick for whom the coolest men had lust and awe- well, you couldn't beat that. All over the country, young women were trying to shoehorn their personalities into that fashionable archetype" talkative girls got stoned and talked slower; unaesthetic girls took to wearing dangly jewelry; pragmatic girls started reading their horoscopes. Verbal, argumentative girls pretended to be anti-intellectual and serene. But many young women (especially, it seemed, in Laurel Canyon) didn't have to try; they naturally personified this glamorous new femininity.... '
"On the other hand, medieval courtliness had its blowback: When you were someone's old lady, a piece of you belonged to your old man- and he was always coming out ahead, because he was a man....'
Pages 296-297
"Ladies of the Canyon" (Joni Mitchell's) was released in March 1970 and it was shot though with idealism and idealization: idealized long-skirted ladies, the pitfalls of worshipful love, the chafing between idealistic women and "straight" moneyed men, the inequity between rock star's wealth and a street musician's poverty, the misguided destruction of "paradise," for the sake of money..."
