Mariah Carey is telling her side of the story.
After three decades in the music industry—much of them spent as a topic of fascination for fans and tabloids alike—the elusive chanteuse has invited the lambs into her world with the publication of her first memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. In the new tell-all, released on Tuesday, Sept. 29, Mariah doesn’t hold back, revealing (with the help of co-author Michaela Angela Davis) her truth about a fraught childhood, marriages to Tommy Mottola and Nick Cannon, the arrival of Dem Babies—her fraternal twins Moroccan and Monroe—and everything in between.
“It took me a lifetime to have the courage and the clarity to write my memoir,” she writes in a note printed in the inside of the book jacket. “Though there have been countless stories about me throughout my career and very public personal life, it’s been impossible to communicate the complexities and depth of my experience in any single magazine article or a ten-minute television interview.
“This book is composed of my memories and my mishaps, my struggles, my survival, and my songs,” she continues. “Unfiltered.”