“Can you please write this down? I am eternally 12,” Mariah Carey announces. She can explain this seemingly impossible hitch in the space-time continuum. (For the record, and according to the Gregorian calendar, she's 52.) First, the self-described “Queen of Christmas” doesn't do years but lives “Christmastime to Christmastime.” More important, as she puts it, 12 is the age of her spirit.
It's also the age at which she started receiving the tough but valuable — and eventually, profitable — life lessons she lays out in her new children's book, The Christmas Princess. “That's when I learned I was definitely ‘other’,” she says. She was living in a small town on New York's Long Island with her mother, who is white, and her father, who is Black. “It would've been great to actually be a chameleon, but I didn't have the tools for it. Meaning we didn't have money.” Her family moved around a lot. “For people in the white neighborhoods where we lived, it was clear that I was mixed with something,” she recalls. “I wasn't like the little girl living next door, with the silky long hair and freckles. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she's what beautv is supposed to be. And I don't fit in with that.’ I had, like. three shirts, and my hair was textured, honey, but it was several textures, and we were not working together. I don't wanna use the word ‘neglected,’ but it wasn't a fashion show.”
Carey began composing poems and songs to process her feelings. “Writing saved me,” she says. Her childhood experiences inspired the lyrics of songs such as her 1997 album track “Outside”: “Standing alone / Eager to just / Believe it's good enough to be what / You really are / But in your heart, uncertainty forever lies / And you'll always be / Somewhere on the outside.”
The Christmas Princess revisits this time in her life, sprinkling in a little light humor and some signature MC holiday magic. “It's a lot about surviving the bullies that are making [the main character] feel ashamed of who she is,” Carey explains. “She survives and finds her destiny.” So what advice would Carey give 12-year-old Mariah now? “Save up your money. Buy some conditioner and a comb, just wet your hair and keep the conditioner on it, and let it air-dry. And you'll be okay?’ ” She pauses and continues: “Oh, and I would've said, ‘Please don't shave your eyebrows. It's never gonna look good on you’.”
Carey remembers the aha moment that led to her new children's book: “It was two years ago at Thanksgiving, and I was making a pot of greens. Cooking for my friends and family, everything that I was doing at the time, I thought, ‘Wow, this is so different from when I was little’.”
While the story's heroine is a 12-year-old named Mariah, it's not autobiographical. “It's a fairy tale,” Carey says — though some details do overlap with her own childhood. Little Mariah's house is a “shack,” unlike the other homes on the street. The staircase has sharp, exposed nails in the boards. Her mom is named La Diva. (Carey's mother, Patricia, was an opera singer.)
The allegory's key message is in how Mariah survives the bullies — including the blonde girls with board-straight locks who can destroy an entire room with a toss of the hair. “Her music rescues her,” Carey says. “It's not a Prince Charming who comes in. She saves her own day.”
