Simon’s tone throughout is surprisingly heavy for someone who often appeared like a carefree, music biz boom-time girl. It can get overblown over matters of the heart, too: her tumultuous relationship with ex-husband James Taylor is likened in florid detail to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. But for the most part, the book reveals her experiences clinically and compellingly, subtly showing us how canny and clever she is.
In her intelligent, rich and occasionally too florid memoir, singer/songwriter Carly Simon writes movingly of the tumult and secrets that dogged her first 38 years...Still, Boys in the Trees meets its lofty expectations. As one of pop music’s more literate songwriters — she was the first solo woman to win a Best Song Oscar for Let the River Run from Working Girl — Simon writes beautifully and affectingly.
Simon is remarkably eager to dish about her sex life, and the many rock stars with whom she had entanglements. But it’s in the more self-searching passages that she gets truly intimate, and reveals herself to be an equally sharp whisperer of her own heart as she is a chronicler of the strange and often reprehensible behavior of men.
