Boys in the Trees: A Memoir
Carly Simon
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1250095913
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
A People Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year!
"Intelligent and captivating. Don't miss it." - People Magazine
"One of the best celebrity memoirs of the year." -The Hollywood Reporter
Rock Star. Composer and Lyricist. Feminist Icon. Survivor.
Simon's memoir reveals her remarkable life, beginning with her storied childhood as the third daughter of Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, her musical debut as half of The Simon Sisters performing folk songs with her sister Lucy in Greenwich Village, to a meteoric solo career that would result in 13 top 40 hits, including the #1 song "You're So Vain." She was the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, for her song "Let the River Run" from the movie Working Girl.
The memoir recalls a childhood enriched by music and culture, but also one shrouded in secrets that would eventually tear her family apart. Simon brilliantly captures moments of creative inspiration, the sparks of songs, and the stories behind writing "Anticipation" and "We Have No Secrets" among many others. Romantic entanglements with some of the most famous men of the day fueled her confessional lyrics, as well as the unraveling of her storybook marriage to James Taylor.
pocketbooks with fringe around the borders. Music stores sold classical and folk albums stuffed in crates, all mixed and merged and spilling onto the sidewalks. Bookstores overflowing with photography books, sheaves of imported paper, books for class, books to impress, books that had called out to me for soulful reasons, like Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, a book my father published in America by an author Daddy had visited in Vienna, whose descriptions of sex and fantasy I found titillating,
may have been the first and last time the word got out that Prince Philip had had a failed first marriage. After trying and failing to get a cab in Trafalgar Square, Willie and I made our way by foot to Wilton Place by 6:30 a.m. The spell was intact: we hadn’t yet kissed. The pale blue-green color of Willie’s eyes matched the early morning sky as we approached the stone front steps of Toad Hall. Lucy, who must have been waiting up for me, called out the window that she’d be right down to unlock
use a sewing machine.) In lieu of learning practical matters, I seemed to have absorbed selective lessons about the power of long, tan legs, which knee looked better crossed over the other, and never to let another person wash your underwear. After a day of tumult on the English Channel, Lucy and I settled into the womblike comfort of our tiny room. After pouring my heart out in the letter to Willie, he’d replied via a telegram that read, simply, “Come home, little fellow.” If I’d thought I
lightly. Over the course of that summer, Jake and I became as close as everyone had vowed we would, with me laughing longer and harder than anyone else at the things he said. Clearly Faye, his girlfriend, “got” Jake, too, and during their years together at Harvard and Radcliffe, where she and Jake were intertwined as the publisher and editor of the Crimson, Faye was no doubt the target of some of Jake’s fabulous cruelty. Still, over the next few weeks, Jake and I developed shared summer rituals:
of them. I didn’t doubt him for a second. Already he was having rock walls constructed by a local artisan, one of the many builders who were helping James bring his vision to life. There was a young group of hippies who lived off James’s land and built things with their hands and hung out at James’s cabin, contributing their ideas, aptitudes, and skills. At the time I couldn’t have dreamed of the powerful hold that James’s cabin would come to have over me. During my first few visits, not wanting