Finally caught up with “Girls Like Us” this weekend and powered right through it. It was a compelling read — obviously, or I wouldn’t have finished it so quickly — but a tad depressing. Did I really want to know that much about Carole King and Carly Simon’s hangups? Not really. 

Sheila Weller weaves together King’s and Simon’s story with that of Joni Mitchell, another seminal singer-songwriter from the 1970s. The three faced similar issues — the struggle to navigate fame, relationships and feminism — but the author’s decision to alternate between their stories doesn’t entirely work: Weller has a habit of switching from one woman to another and leaving the reader hanging. This is especially problematic if readers find one woman’s story less compelling than the others, as was the case with me and Mitchell. Seemingly to get around this, the author awkwardly inserts references to the other women in chapters about the third. In more adroit hands this might have worked more effectively. 

It’s easy to see why she built her narrative around these three, however: Their struggles rep different aspects of the feminist puzzle. Brooklyn-bred King got knocked up at 17 and wrote Top 40 hits with her husband before finding her own voice as a singer; Mitchell, uncompromising artist to this day, fled the Canadian plains after secretly giving up her child for adoption; Simon, a poor little rich kid from Manhattan, overcame reverse snobbery to deftly articulate the ambivalence of educated women weighing marriage and career. 

Growing up in the 1970s, it was hard to avoid their songs on the radio; I distinctly remember shouting out the words to “You’ve Got a Friend” and other “Tapestry” hits with my schoolyard chums; post college, Simon songs such as “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” took on added relevance.  

Weller does a good job providing the cultural context; she’s very sympathetic to the plight of women. The book is at its liveliest chronicling the heady period of the 1970s when they broke through: It’s amusing to read who was sleeping with whom and when, and to read about the music scene in L.A., while Gloria Steinem prepared to launch Ms. mag in New York.  

The pleasure fades, however, as the women struggle to maintain their relationships, and crank out more hits. King, the seemingly steady earth mother, drops out to Idaho, where she marries two controlling mountain men; Simon  struggles to lead James Taylor out of heroin addiction while coping with her own debilitating neuroses. And Mitchell can’t find a lasting relationship with a musician of equal, or inferior, talent.    

Are these romantic woes due to fame, feminism or fucked up families? Weller never makes it clear. But she plumbs every romantic trial and tribulation to bathetic degree. One can only imagine what Mitchell or King, neither of whom talked to the author, would say about that. For a book titled “Girls Like Us,” Weller sure spends a lot of time on the men in their lives.