Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon---and the Journey of a Generation

Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon remain among the most enduring and important women in popular music. Each woman is distinct: King is the product of outer-borough, middle-class New York City; Mitchell is a granddaughter of Canadian farmers; and Simon is a child of the Manhattan intellectual upper crust. They collectively represent, in their lives and their songs, a great swath of American girls who came of age in the late 1960s. Their stories trace the arc of the now-mythic generation known as "the sixties"-the female version-but in a bracingly specific and deeply recalled way, far from cliché. The history of the women of that generation had never been written-until now-and it is told through the resonant lives and emblematic songs of Mitchell, Simon, and King.