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It seems like everyone in the entertainment industry is either making a documentary or releasing a memoir with the intention of revealing the truth behind their stardom.

Paris Hilton’s YouTube doccie This is Paris takes a look at her troubled childhood and the infamous sex tape that that went viral over the course of the two years after its release in 2003.

Lady Gaga recently released Five Foot Two, which documents the events around her halftime performance at the Super Bowl, complete with a look at her persistent health issues.

Taylor Swift has a Netflix documentary in which she “speaks up about social and political issues that she believes in”.

Justin Bieber tried to do something as well, in an attempt to introduce a new, more mature Bieber to the world, but there’s only so much footage of the Biebs snogging his wife that one can sit through before the nausea kicks in.

The latest celeb to release a tell-all is Mariah Carey, with her new memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey.

In popular culture, she represents the ultimate diva. When she visited South Africa in 2016, she demanded that Table Mountain change colour for her. Prior backstage demands include 20 white kittens and 100 white doves.

In the memoir, however, she sets out to paint a different picture of her life, with, as the BBC reports, some surprising and at times jarring revelations:

She was a witness to domestic violence at an early age

She recalls a number of fights between her father Alfred and brother Morgan.

“By the time I was a toddler, I had developed the instincts to sense when violence was coming,” Carey writes.

“It was not uncommon for holes to be punched in walls or for other objects to go flying.”

At age six, she remembers calling a family friend for help when her mother was assaulted.

Her experiences with racism

Carey’s father was black and her mother white. Many of her friends didn’t know that she was biracial.

She even recalls a teacher laughing and saying: “Oh, Mariah, you used the wrong crayon,” when, aged four, she drew her father with brown skin.

“A brew of self-consciousness and embarrassment boiled up from my feet to my face,” she writes.

She describes her first encounters with racism as “a first kiss in reverse”, explaining: “Each time, a piece of purity was ripped from my being.”

She also writes about a traumatic sleepover with a group of girls who repeatedly shouted the n-word at her.

“The venom and hate with which these girls spewed this… chant was so strong, it quite literally lifted me out of my body,” says Carey. “I was disorientated and terrified and I thought that maybe, if I held on and just kept crying, surely a grown-up would come and stop the assault. But no-one came.”

Experiences like these later inspired the song ‘Outside’.

She had a troubling relationship with her sister

When Carey was young, she realised that her sister Alison’s boyfriend was running a prostitution ring.

Aged 12, she claims she was tricked into spending a night alone with him, ending up at a card game and a drive-in movie, where “almost immediately” he put his arm around her.

Immobilised and terrified by the “handgun resting against his thigh”, Carey says she only escaped after another car pulled up alongside them, prompting John to leave and drive home “in silence”.

Alison has denied these claims.

Her first husband was incredibly controlling

Carey married Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola in June 1993.

The couple’s $32m home was “fully staffed with armed guards” and Carey refers to it as “Sing Sing” after the maximum security prison in New York.

In 1996, when she recorded a remix of ‘Always Be My Baby’ with hip-hop producer Jermaine Dupri, following which they decided to go to a Burger King, Mottola allegedly went “berserk”, calling out an armed search party.

They separated the following year.

She recorded a secret grunge album

I did not see that one coming.

While recording her fifth album. ‘Daydream’, in 1995, she cut a secret alt-rock record.

“I created an alter-ego artist and her Ziggy Stardust-like spoof band,” she explains. “My character was a dark-haired brooding Goth girl who wrote and sang ridiculous tortured songs.

“I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time. They could be angry, angsty and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips and unruly eyebrows, while every move I made was so calculated and manicured. I wanted to break free, let loose and express my misery – but I also wanted to laugh.”

The album was released in 1995, under the pseudonym Chick, and yes we do have a sample of it for you:

Ha, not bad.

I prefer this to literally everything else that she has done.

You’ll find more Chick songs here.

[source:bbc]