(May 22, 2008) PCM's Ashley spoke to author Sheila Weller, whose book Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - And the Journey of a Generation has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for weeks. Sheila spoke about writing the book and how the three artists reflected the changes for young women growing up during the sixties.

SW: Hello, this is Sheila.

AD: Hi Sheila, this is Ashley calling from Pop Culture Madness.

SW: Oh hi, Ashley, how are you?

AD: I'm good, thanks. Did you just get back from your book tour?

SW: Yes.

AD: Okay, how long were you on tour?

SW: For two weeks.

AD: Oh, where did you go?

SW: Well, I went to L.A., I went to Portland, then I went to the interior of Oregon, where I'd never been before, to a cute little bookstore there. Then I went to the Bay Area: San Francisco and Berkley.

AD: Wow. So you're book has been getting a lot of press lately!

SW: It has. It's been so good.

AD: Were you surprised by the response?

SW: You know, I'm not even sure - it's been great. I mean, I didn't have time - when you're doing something like this, you have one thing after another to worry about. I didn't even get to be concerned about how it would do. It's definitely hugely gratifying.

AD: Yeah, so you've written several other non-fiction, research-driven books, and I was just wondering how you got the idea for this one.

SW: This is the book that I've always wanted to write.

AD: Okay...

SW: I'm a member of that generation. I always wanted to write a history of the generation, ever since I read - I just had lunch with my friend Sara Davidson. I say that I bring her name up in every interview. She wrote a great book called Loose Change in 1978. And I said, "I should have written this." It was about women of the sixties.

AD: Uh-huh.

SW: So I said, "one day I'm going to do something like this." It just came back to me again and again between all the other books that I have indeed written and all the other magazine articles. Late 2001 or early 2002, I was taking a walk in the country and I've always been thinking of their music and, not just their music, but their lives. I just remember what they meant. We kind of looked across the celebrity divide to them and we meshed ourselves to them. They didn't seem that different from us, even though they were wildly talented. They were kind of archetypal versions of what we were going through. I mean, there were girls that looked like Joni that had the long skirts and the long hair and the shawls and lived in garrets with their guitars. And that was all new. When Carole became the "Earth Mother" of Laurel Canyon; you know, the not beautiful girl that everyone trusted and liked so much, who was sort of the center of the circle, you just kind of completely understood who she was and you had counterparts in your own community.

AD: Right.

SW: Carly came out in '71 with the first feminist band and then, of course, the first feminist rock and roll song was a new groovy chick with the stovepipe pants and the poncho and that very urbane, saucy way of putting feminism in a very sexy context. We all knew who she was, and if you were living in New York at the time, you had friends who looked like that, too. (laughs) Maybe not as good looking. So one day it literally just came to me to take their three lives and write it not like a pop music book, where you talk about record producers and deals and agents and that kind of stuff, but like The Group or Superior Women or Loose Change, where three coming-of-age stories alternated.

AD: So you were a fan of all three of these artists growing up.

SW: Yes. And not just a fan, but we considered - I was in the media and you kind of just relate to them, the way women in their thirties relate to the women on Sex and the City. That's the counterpart.

AD: Did you consider other female singer-songwriters of their time?

SW: I did. For about two days Linda Ronstadt was in that mix. But she actually never wrote her own songs and she didn't have the resonance that the other ones did.

AD: So it was pretty much always Carole King-

SW: And the way the reviewers have reacted really validated my feelings that it was really the trio that described the generation.

AD: For readers of our website who haven't had a chance to pick up your book yet, could you just give them a brief summary about the book and how the three artists reflected their times?

SW: Well, they were each as different - as women, two was different than the one, and one was different from the other, so if you put them all together they sort of tell the story. Two of them had middle to lower-middle class backgrounds: Joni and Carole, and they actually the most intricately ambitious. So, lower-middle class backgrounds, they had very conventional morality about sex. Carole got pregnant as a teenager and immediately rushed into a big, white wedding and that was what was done at the time. Joni had a baby out of wedlock; secret, secret, hid it from her parents, gave the baby up for adoption. Carly was a very privileged young woman and in a very sophisticated, culturally sophisticated and sexually sophisticated household, so she did not have those restrictions. But she found her ambition a little later, for lots of reasons. She had two older sisters, they didn't have sisters. They were essentially only children. We kind of look at them all together. There were ways in which they were different and similar and they added up to a complete story.

AD: Mmhm...

SW: In terms of their archetype, Carole was, both in the songs, and the personae, and the situations - But the song 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow' really was a birth; it was kind of like the unknown opening salvo to the sexual revolution. It came out in 1960 when Kennedy was just elected president and the birth control pill was just being developed. Metaphorically, it was the first song about women's sexual agency. Much bolder than anything that was on the radio, it was actually the first number one song by an African-American girl group, The Shirelles, and it was the first number one song by any girl group - I found that out later. It was lots of things. It's not coincidental that Joni Mitchell loved that song.

AD: Yeah.

SW: She immediately picked up on what that was. And then Carole wrote her other hits with her first husband Gerry Coffin, that were the real the Brill Building hits. They were better than commercial music; they were kind of elegies of urban life that kind of prepared people for the civil rights years, the Bobby Kennedy years. That period of the sixties where it seemed like it was all "pump it out" pop music, but there was really a group of young songwriters that was telling a more soulful story to suburban kids. She did all of that. She did Tapestry - that was a huge, huge album for the entire first half of the seventies. Again, she was like the Earth Mother next door. It was through Carole King that the idea that a female, a young person, could be beautiful from the inside. She didn't have to be a "classic beauty." That was very new at the time. It was natural.

AD: Yeah, that sort of hippie thing.

SW: Joni was a lot of things. She was kind of the bohemian princess of the psychedelic era, not the loud psychedelic era but kind of the soft. She was the artist of the rippley script, you know, kind of the swirls. If you look at the graphic design of her first album, it's all that kind of introspective graphic, that swirly graphic design. She took herself very seriously as an artist, lived alone in New York, wrote a series of songs, Chelsea Morning, At Both Sides Now and Cactus Tree, that basically marked the beginning of young women living alone at that particular time in the city, as kind of adventurous bohemians - bohemians, but with a lot of dignity. And it was hard to do then because it was just not the culture that supported women demanding certain treatment from guys. So young women looked to her for that to echo their feeling that they could do that themselves.

AD: Right.

SW: Her music continues to be very resonating to women, all they way through. I have heard so many times about women who were probably ten years old when Blue came out, that when they broke up with their boyfriends, they would play Joni Mitchell's Blue. Carly with the urban - when feminism went from being this strictly political, serious, in-the-barricades thing and Ms. Magazine was starting, it became something that was important to sell to the culture - kind of the media version of feminism that made it what it is today. Carly was the embodiment of it. She was urban, she was sophisticated, she went to a Seven Sisters college, which all the women that were out there at the time did: Ali MacGraw, Julia Steinem, Erica Jong, and so forth.

AD: Uh-huh.

SW: So Carly was really the girl of the moment. I was in New York at the time she sang the song 'That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be.' That was her first hit single from her first album and it was about a woman criticizing marriage because it was restrictive, which was something a guy always did before. At that very moment all these women in her peer group in New York - well, not all of them, but at least four that I can name - were splitting from their husbands, getting the doctrine of feminism straight into their veins and writing about the whole thing for Esquire and Ms. and books. So they just really mirrored so many things that were going on. When she married James Taylor, everybody kind of held their breath and looked at them, you know, "You weren't supposed to want to get married anymore, but hey, I'll make an exception for James Taylor."

AD: (laughs)

SW: She had a lot of situations that were familiar. She was soaring in popularity when he was kind of sinking. He didn't like her music, so there was all this stuff going on, conflict with the new way you were supposed to be with a guy and the way that it kept coming back to. She raised two kids with him and he was a heroin or a methadone addict the entire time. That, too, was something that young women who romanticized in the sixties kind of outlaws were reaping the results of. If you actually settled down with a guy like that, it was much more complicated, and you were suddenly becoming a mom and had to snap to reality and were dealing with the results of having romanticized a guy like that. I mean, obviously [James Taylor] had a lot more to offer than most men who were heroin addicts. There were just many, many things that followed a very familiar script, a very familiar pattern, that women in the generation lived through.

AD: Well, the scope of Girls Like Us seems much broader than your other books, so I was wondering how long it took you to research and write. I think you said something about really getting the idea for it in 2001?

SW: Yes, it was the winter, and it was either December of 2001 or January of 2002, so I finished in two years.

AD: Wow. How did you approach all that material?

SW: Well, the first thing to do was to gather all that material, and I just - I had gotten good at going and getting interviews with people who were hard to get interviews with. I had done that with my O.J. book and those other ones, so I kind of figured if I did it for those, I could do it even for three living legends, which is harder. You just become a little machine; you just go to one after another. You have three lives to deal with, so the fact that it took that long was ultimately beneficial because if I had a more compressed writing schedule - for example, I wrote magazine articles all the way through - if those were taken out of the mix, I might have left out some people that it was important to talk to.

AD: When you were actually writing it, did you write each woman's story individually - because I know that a lot of times in the book you would have parentheses and say, "At this time Joni was doing this" or "Carole was doing this" - so you really sort of molded the three stories together. But how did you actually write that?

SW: I wrote them in the order that you seen them. I wanted to keep the time frame. At the beginning, especially when I was doing their childhoods, I thought, "Wait a minute, what did I get myself into? Are people going to want to read the same period of years three separate times? It's kind of like Groundhog Day." And I wondered if it was too much childhood, but ultimately, in any biography, you really need to know their childhood before you move on, so I'm very grateful that the readers weren't impatient with that. They were impatient with things like my long sentences and my frequent use of end dashes and parentheses, but what I was worried about, the repetition of the time frames, nobody fussed at me for.

AD: Mmhm. So you were really eating, breathing and sleeping these women for a very long time. Afterwards, like now, can you still listen to their music and relate to it, or are you just ready to throw their CDs out the window?

SW: No, I feel like their music is so in my bloodstream. I did put all the CDs in a box and I put the box in a shelf, and now I'm listening to Amy Winehouse all the time.

AD: Maybe you can do an Amy Winehouse book!

SW: I listened to their music for five years; it was wonderful listening to that music and when I would get to a chapter - I sort of bought the albums helter-skelter, without any particular order, and actually at the beginning I didn't even know what order some of the albums were in - so a lot of the later albums that are not as well known and were not as successful, I didn't even know about. By the time I got to certain points in the book where the albums were really meaningful, it was like cuing them all for the first time because I knew what went into them, I knew what lives had been accumulated by the time they wrote those albums.

AD: They were more relatable and even more personal, weren't they?

SW: Yes. When I got to Carly's Coming Around Again, I almost burst into tears because that's an album that I've always loved. It's wonderful, it's so well-produced, but by the time I got to that point in her life - and of course she was the third of the stories that I always told; I told her story last - by the time I got there and listened to those songs again, it felt great.

AD: Did you find one of the three women more identifiable?

SW: I really feel that that's why the three of them made sense. At different points, for me personally, I could identify with different people. Probably personally for me, Joni less so, but my sister would fill in the gap since she was a Joni. She had the long hair, she had the guitar, she had the long gown, and she was very into Joni. But I think women who read this find things that just pop out at them, and they're unexpected, like things I wouldn't necessarily expect, like something about a relationship just reminds someone of their relationship in a way that I haven't thought of before. I mean, I relate to Carole being a workaholic, I relate to Carly being a Manhattan woman. I just think there are pieces, there are dilemmas they would get into or situations that would just strike them as things they could identify with.

AD: I read a couple of reviews that said that this book is primarily appealing to people who actually lived through the generation. Do you agree with that, or did you have a particular audience in mind when you were writing it?

SW: When I was writing it, I kept saying to myself, "What I want someone to say is 'She was there.'" So you definitely want to be able to tell a story that you think has been miss told. I definitely wanted it to be for peers. But I think it went way beyond that, which is great. I've learned from this, what I had a hunch about, was that this music has been fantastically universal. I think so many people of both genders have loved these women for so long, and maybe they love one more than the other or two, but it all evens out. I found it went way beyond, and what I heard a lot, and I think more about Tapestry than any other album, is that young women in their twenties said, "I remember every word of every song of Tapestry when my mother played it in the car when she drove me to school every single day for three years. Or guys in their thirties, late thirties or early forties would say the same thing, "My older sister played this every day for three years." So I really think that it spans out.

AD: Earlier you mentioned Sex and the City as sort of similar to the impact that these women had, but do you think there have been other more recent female musicians who have spoken to their generation in the same way?

SW: Well, people ask me that and I say, "I personally think that Norah Jones is terrific, I think that Alicia Keys is terrific, and in a different way, Amy Winehouse." I mean, she has a less exemplary life that way, but I think her music is fabulous. But I think this: I think that back when Joni and Carole and Carly were making their first wonderful songs in the late sixties and early seventies song that were so magnetic, there was so little in the media, especially in the early part of that period of years. Movies were very inhibited; there were very few movies that addressed the counterculture. There were only three TV stations. There was no MTV. There were radio stations. There was no Internet; there was no blogging; there was nothing like that. There was so little media that spoke directly to young people… I don't know that any one singer, or two or three singers, can have that same effect today.

AD: Yeah, it's sort of hard to compare since the media is just so pervasive.

SW: Yes, it's so pervasive and also so many of the hurdles have been leaped. I mean, this generation has hurdles that we never had. They have a world out of control: global warming, terrorism, resource depletion. We had a simple, safe, middle class, boring world, and this world is so much more dangerous. But we had personal things to get over. We were going through the post feminist era, so we had a lot of fabulous work to do and exciting things to do in that regard, but there's not that much left. I think so many of those hurdles have been smashed that I'm lucky, I feel, that it was great to live during a time that we did that. But I think the younger generation really has the harder job of living with the dangerous world.

AD: So, what are you working on now? Are you working on anything?

SW: I loved this so much, I can't even think about what I'm going to do next!

AD: I was going to say, "You must be so tired of writing right now!"

SW: No, I'm always doing magazine stuff. I'm a senior contributing editor at Glamour and I'm sitting here right now coming up with ideas.

AD: I was just going to ask if you were writing something about Carly and Carole and Joni for Glamour.

SW: Well, to promote your book you keep doing things, you keep doing blogs, which I'm not good at, which I need to learn how to do, and you do little freebie things for websites. So I'm trying to think of a good op ed piece matching it up with Sex and the City in some witty way, but I haven't figured that one out.

AD: Do you have any ideas of what you'd like to do next for your next book?

SW: Um, if I do I'm kind of chewing them over with my agent. But there's nothing - I wish I had better ideas than I do. This one meant so much to me that it'll be hard to find something that's that meaty that I want to do as much.

AD: You've done - I think that all your work has been non-fiction. Have you thought about doing a fiction book?

SW: Well, believe it or not, my first book was a novel.

AD: (Whoops!) Oh, okay.

SW: It was a novel called Hansel and Gretel in Beverly Hills, and that one really worked and that like eight million years ago. But this is much better for me. And I only read non-fiction. I don't know; I'm just naturally not a novelist and I feel very empowered when I'm writing about something real. I mean, I think it's great that people write fiction, but this is better for me.

AD: They're two completely different things, too.

SW: Yeah. Whenever I read fiction, I want it to be as real as it can be, and it almost always fails me.

AD: I think that's about all I have. Is there anything else you want to add for readers of the site to know?

SW: Well, just that I have a website that is www.girlslikeusthebook.com, and I'm trying to get a blog going, so visit the site, write me posts on the blog.

AD: Okay, great. Thank you so much for talking to me.

SW: Thank you.