I was always drawn to Mariah Careys music. After reading her memoir, I understand why. -

It’s been 30 years since Mariah Carey released her debut album and stunned audiences with her seemingly ever-accessible whistle register. Over the years, she has alluded to a painful past, but no thinly veiled song reference or shade-tinged interview has painted a full picture of Carey, one of the most prolific and best-selling pop stars of our time.

The singer’s new memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” fills in the gaps and reminds us of all that Carey has overcome, largely on her own, and well ahead of our cultural reckoning on racism and gender inequality. In one of her shrewdest insights, Carey (who wrote alongside Michaela Angela Davis) notes that she was one of the first artists to cultivate an ongoing relationship with her fans, and give them a name — the Lambily — laying the groundwork for the Swifties, Beliebers and Little Monsters to come.

Carey’s music and backstory have always resonated with me. Like Carey, I grew up with a White mother and a Black father. I didn’t know many multiracial people then, and Carey gave me a reference for the otherness I felt every day. My Mariah fandom became part of my identity, one of the few things about myself I didn’t have to hide.

Reading Carey’s book helped me understand, on a deeper level, what drew me to her music and public persona. She approaches her memoir with the same vulnerability and openness I gravitated toward in her music. But I hadn’t realized just how similar our stories were.

I was an awkward and introspective 12-year-old when I discovered Mariah Carey. It was right before she released “Butterfly,” and I was obsessed with the album’s lead track, “Honey.” It was giddy and fresh — and edgy for a preteen. I felt invigorated every time I listened to it.

When “Butterfly” came out, I listened to it constantly. I was struggling to carve out my own identity, and one song, “Outside” spoke to how I often felt.

“It’s hard to explain

“Inherently it’s just always been strange

“Neither here nor there

“Always somewhat out of place everywhere.”

‘Butterfly’ changed Mariah Carey’s career. It also helped change pop music.

Listening to Mariah made me feel like myself — the person I often couldn’t be at home, where I was constantly on guard.

“I was always so scared as a little girl, and music was my escape,” Carey writes in an early chapter. “My house was heavy, weighed down with yelling and chaos. When I sang in a whispery tone, it calmed me down.”

Singing liberated her from a childhood marred by violence and neglect. She writes of fights between her father and brother that were so extreme, the police had to be called; her sister throwing a mug of scalding tea at her; and her mother leaving her home alone when she was just 6 years old. But she also gives her mother, Patricia Carey, a Juilliard-trained opera singer, credit for encouraging her vocal talent and surrounding her with accomplished musicians.

Estranged from her siblings, Carey did make peace with her father before he died in 2002. But her relationship with her mother, whom she calls Pat, is complicated. “I have reserved some room in my heart and life to hold her — but with boundaries,” she writes.

Reading these words took me back, not just to the lifeline I found in Carey’s music, but to the pain I needed to escape from: a stepmother — the only mother I had — who was emotionally and physically abusive; her constant reminders that she didn’t have to care for me, that she chose to after marrying my father when I was 4 years old; the “creative punishments” she doled out because, she said, I was manipulative and inconsiderate and no one else would have me.

That wasn’t true: My paternal grandparents helped raise me and loved me deeply, as did my father who was unaware of the abuse. Plus, I still had Mariah.

In the summer of 1998, I spent countless hours in my grandparents’ family room watching her music videos, which were detailed and stylish. She wore her hair curly and big in the “My All/Stay Awhile” video, which made me feel better about my own (albeit frizzier) hair in the summer heat.

Now that I’ve read her book, I realize what a statement of reclamation that was. Carey devotes a chapter (“Detangled and Swept Away”) to largely painful memories associated with her curly, multi-textured hair, which she says her mother never bothered to figure out.

“Having one Black and one white parent is complicated, but when you are a little girl with a white mother, largely cut off from other Black women and girls, it can be excruciatingly lonely,” Carey writes.

Her classmates dubbed her “Fozzie Bear,” like the Muppets character.

I had spent the first few years of my life with my dad and my Black grandparents at my father’s childhood home, where my hair had never been a problem. But my stepmother, who was White like my biological mother, approached my hair like something that needed to be fixed. When I got head lice in the second grade, she cut my long, thick curls into a bowl cut. My hair had grown out by middle school, where my classmates called me “Puff,” until I started straightening it.

Carey is clear that the discrimination she faced was rooted in racism. She writes of being invited to a popular girl’s house for the weekend only to have the girl and her friends cruelly hurl the n-word her way. A star turn as Hodel in a camp production of “Fiddler on the Roof” was overshadowed by horrified stares from her peers and their parents when her father approached the stage to give her flowers: “They were staring because my father was the only Black man in sight, and I belonged to him.”

Likewise, I never quite fit in at the predominantly White schools I attended — my peers (both Black and White) tended to treat me as whatever they weren’t. (If I’d had a dollar for every person who approached me and asked, “What are you?,” I could have self-funded at least one semester of college.)

I occasionally annoyed my high school classmates with my love for a singer who so many oversimplified as a diva; I found a way to work a Mariah reference into just about every session of my favorite class (journalism, shocker). I moved into my college dorm with two DVDs featuring music videos, concert footage and interviews with Mariah. (I also brought a pink Hello Kitty TV, which may have been inspired by a certain “Cribs” episode.) I often joked about my love for Mariah being a little too-on-the-nose given our backgrounds. But now I see just how significant her music was in shaping me.

A look at ‘Mariah’s World’

After years of very public ups and downs, Carey released “The Emancipation of Mimi” in 2005, and it became her big comeback album.

That album, Carey writes, was “also a major moment” for her fans. “It was what they needed ... to see me come back like that. I really believe, for better or for worse, the Lambily, the fans and I, go through things together.”

A year later, I was graduating from college and quickly began an internship far from home. I was lonely, sad and just beginning to process what I had experienced as a child and how it had affected my life. I worked constantly, but on a random day off, I filled out an online trivia quiz sent to members of the only fan club to which I have ever belonged.

By the time I returned to Maryland that fall, I had forgotten all about that quiz and the prize attached to it — until I received an email informing me that I had won front-row seats to the “Adventures of Mimi” tour. Less than a week later, I sat feet away from my idol as she sang the songs that helped me feel seen when I was invisible, the songs that had given me hope.

As the concert ended, thousands of purple foil butterflies rained down from the ceiling. My transformation was just beginning, but I had never felt more free.

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