Carole King feels like a ‘Natural Woman’

As an artist, Carole King helped pave the way for generations of creatively autonomous women. As a woman, she long harbored a desperate need for male affection and affirmation, enduring troubled and even abusive relationships.

That dichotomy is the crux of A Natural Woman, the candid, endearingly chatty memoir that traces King's rise from a precocious Brooklyn girl to one of the world's most beloved singer/songwriters.

In her teens and early 20s, she wrote the music for such enduring hits as the Aretha Franklin classic alluded to in the title and The Shirelles' Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. King wasn't yet 30 when Tapestry established her as a superstar in her own right in the 1970s. It became one of the best-selling albums of all time.

Flip through photos from the singer's life

By that point, she was a mother of three — divorced from the writing partner with whom she had made her name, lyricist Gerry Goffin, and married to Charlie Larkey, a musician several years her junior and, career-wise, very much in her shadow. Another child would follow, and two more marriages, both to younger, less successful, emotionally needy men, one of whom beat her.

"When I look back at my relationships with men, I see a pattern," King, now 70, writes. "As a child, my strong will was juxtaposed with wanting to please my father. … By the time I was a grown woman, seeking the approval of a man had become a firmly established element of my psychological framework."

King recounts her experiences without bitterness, even for her third spouse and batterer, Rick Evers, who is presented as a delusional wanna-be rock star who eventually died of a cocaine overdose. (Her fourth marriage, to carpenter Rick Sorensen, ended in divorce.)

Describing the harrowing effect that Goffin's chemical adventures and mental struggles had on their young family, she expresses both frustration and compassion.

But A Natural Woman is hardly a sob story. There's more humor and joy than pathos; and predictably, many of the happy moments involve music. There are leisurely, detailed accounts of recording sessions, and of collaborations, friendships and memorable encounters with fellow icons such as John Lennon and James Taylor.

King credits Taylor, with whom she reunited for a 2010 tour, with helping her gain confidence as a performer.

"The key to success in performing," she discovered, "is to be authentically myself."

That's something King appears to do naturally these days.