Mariah Carey reveals sad reason she wrote All I Want for Christmas
Mariah Carey has opened up about how her troubled childhood led her to write her biggest hit of all, All I Want for Christmas is You.
The singer's new autobiography, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, details the violence and neglect she experienced at home as a child, after her parents split up when she was three.
In a new interview with The Guardian to promote the autobiography, the singer said she has always been 'cryptic about the past', but certain scars remain.
'I think my staying up all night started from having such a dysfunctional family,' she explained. 'Oftentimes, whoever was in the house was doing whatever it was they were doing, and that felt kinda unsafe to me, so I started staying up.'
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In the memoir, Carey writes that she also became obsessed with Christmas because her childhood Christmases were unhappy ones. She said this became the inspiration for her biggest hit because she wanted 'to write a song that would make me feel like a carefree young girl at Christmas'.
All I Want for Christmas is You was released in 1994. Sixteen million copies of the single have since been sold (from which Carey is rumoured to have made $60m in royalties) and it remains the biggest Christmas song by a female artist.
Carey also touched upon growing up mixed race in the US – a main theme in the book. Her late father was African-American and her mother is white. She says she was often called racist names by white girls at her school, so tried to shun any affiliation with Black culture. Since then, she has struggled with her identity.
'I can't help that I'm ambiguous looking,' she told the newspaper. 'Most people would assume that's been to my benefit, and maybe it has in some ways. But it's also been a lifelong quest to feel like I should belong to any specific group. It shouldn't have to be such a freaking thing.'
You can read The Guardian's full interview with Mariah Carey here.
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