How Carly Simon found her voice

Carly Simon used to have a debilitating stammer, she tells TheDailybeast.com. Starting at age 6, whenever she tried to pronounce certain words, her throat would close up, leaving her speechless. “I knew the words,” says the 63-year-old singer, “but there was no transportation available to them. Like a nightmare where you have to run, but have huge invisible weights attached to your ankles.” Simon tried to hide her affliction, but inevitably her classmates pounced on it. “There was merciless teasing. I was beaten into states of self-hatred. I knew the answers in class and couldn’t raise my hand. Hiding was my game.” But a turning point came when she was 16 and her boyfriend at the time, a Harvard freshman named Nick, put her at ease—with a simple gesture. “Nick told me that not only was it something he didn’t love me in spite of, but, matter of fact, because of. He thought it was ‘charming.’ Charming? That was completely alien a thought to me. I had spent 10 years trying urgently to hide it. Now it was sexy. All of a sudden I was exotic, different in a positive way. I was eccentric, artistic.” Her stammer occasionally resurfaces, but ever since her boyfriend erased her shame, it hasn’t been an obstacle in her life. “How do you like that? He loved away my stutter. Acceptance was the key.”

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