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By Doug Wagner

I recently got around to reading Carole King’s “memoir,” which is actually an autobiography, and there’s a big difference. An autobiography is an account of an entire life, with an objective, chronological narrative, while a memoir is a more subjective, reflective consideration of a certain aspect of a life—a theme, a period, an event. Ideally, choosing which way to go and what to focus on is a matter of serving the reader. Are you such an important figure that literally millions of admirers want every detail of your life, career-related or otherwise? If not, what aspect of your life has earned you permission to take up readers’ time with your story? In King’s case, the answer is clearly her artistry, but unfortunately she takes up our time with much more than that.

It appears that she didn’t use a ghostwriter, and that would have made all the difference. She needed someone to keep her from covering too much ground too superficially—and to force her to expound at length on Tapestry, for God’s sake. The right collaborator could have made sure that King left posterity with some understanding of how this unique life changed all our lives. As it is, A Natural Woman: a Memoir comes up short on the how.

Things starts out well enough, with a focus on King’s childhood in ’40s and ’50s Brooklyn. While the stories that are the basis for memoirs often don’t begin in childhood, hers was music-centric and the right place to start. In fact, for the first two hundred pages, she gives us exactly what we want and expect: a fascinating look, through the eyes of a teenager, at how the music business operated in the ’50s and early ’60s and, later, her collaborations with the likes of Gerry Goffin, Don Kirshner, James Taylor, Lou Adler and on and on. Incredibly, where things go awry is with the creation of Tapestry, her 1971 masterpiece.

“People often ask if I knew, when I was recording Tapestry, … that it would touch so many people,” King says. “How could I know that? I was simply doing what I’d always done—recording songs that I had written or cowritten.” And that’s as close as she comes to self-examination on the topic of the album that spent more time on the Billboard charts than any other except Dark Side of the Moon. There’s no acknowledgment that this musical milestone changed the course of rock lyrics forever. No exploration of where it came from. Nothing about the creative process per se beyond the recording technology and the musical personnel.

How did she come to find herself illuminating the human condition so authentically and vulnerably? What inspired her to just bare her soul like that and become so emotionally intimate with the listener? Did she somehow know the time was right for rock lyrics to get personal? We may never know.

King says it took her almost twelve years to write A Natural Woman because it was important to her to do it herself. On one hand, the determination to tell one’s story oneself is admirable, but on the other, if you’re not an expert at storytelling—at least not at memoir length—it may turn out that you’re the only one who’s satisfied with the result. Had King’s editor urged her to dig deeper and deliver the memoir implied by the title, we’d probably be more enlightened about the workings of creative genius. Instead, we know much more than we need to know about King’s romantic relationships, which account for much of the second half of the book.

For Tapestry, King knew the perfect telling details to include in the lyrics and the perfect ones to omit for the sake of giving listeners room to feel a part of things. For her “memoir,” her instincts aren’t nearly so sharp. Maybe editors’ tendency when working with celebrities is to give them a relatively free hand, but that’s not doing them any favors. Chances are their artistry and expertise don’t extend to writing a memoir, so what’s the point of letting them call their own shots? Without sufficient guidance, they just might turn in an autobiography instead of a memoir. It’s the difference between knowing when to cut to the chase and not knowing what to cut. If you have a relative who can’t tell you a story without giving you the full bio of every single person involved, you know what I’m talking about. Whatever the plan was for A Natural Woman, the result is an account of an extraordinary musical life that devolves into all-too-ordinary soap opera. In Life, Keith Richards had no problem filling 547 pages with reflections on his art. It all revolves around the music, and he dives as deep into the creative process as a fan could hope and then some. We hear about relationships, but they never take over the story. They’re incidental, as they should be. There’s never a point where the story proper ends and he forges on anyway, feeling obligated to depict this or that liaison or relocation or trip abroad because he thinks the story would be incomplete without it. He and collaborator James Fox know what the fans want and stick to it. For 547 pages.

Sometimes collaboration is essential. The most effective experts and leaders know what they don’t know, and whenever necessary to fill in the gaps, they call in those who do know. Carole King, of all people, should recognize the power of collaboration. If she hadn’t had the good fortune to strike up a partnership with Goffin, she may have spent her career as a session pianist toiling in obscurity. But she—and we—did have that good fortune, and rock lyrics have been capturing a deeper truth ever since.

We can’t always evaluate our own lives in a way that allows us to know what will serve readers best, to know what information and opinions are vital to share and why. When should we function mainly as observers, when should we share our insights, when should we just get on with the story already? It’s a collaborator’s job to know the answers, and if you’re working with a good one, you don’t need to worry that he or she will leave out things that really are important or let you try readers’ patience with experiences that were much more profound for you than they will be for them. A good collaborator knows your audience and knows what to do to connect you with it.

A collaborator, be it a ghost or an editor, is nothing to be afraid of. Collaboration should be a source of relief. Relief that you don’t have to know all those answers yourself or know what you don’t know. And in the end, your story will still be your story, in your voice, only better told than if you hadn’t called in an expert.

Don’t make the mistake of believing your memoir can be either your story or the best possible story. Good collaborators can often capture an author’s voice better than the author can, and they can see the story through the audience’s eyes, which makes it easy to identify where there’s too much of something and too little of something else. It’s their job to make sure it’s your story and the best story. While the prospect of allowing a collaborator into the process might feel suspiciously like setting yourself up to be judged, remember that readers are judges too. And they’re not necessarily on your side.