More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon by Stephen Davis

symptoms: night terrors, agoraphobia, a worsening stammer, and a painful constriction in her throat that their baffled family doctor described as a “worry lump.” Carly hated Ronnie, and she wasn’t sure why. She wondered if she hated her mother, too.
    “Our family used music to get through this and other rough periods,” Peter Simon remembers. “The musicales and jam sessions continued on the weekends and holidays. Our fabulous uncle Peter Dean gave Carly and me as much attention as he could, but it was never enough. I was too young to know what was going on, but I know Carly really suffered: first from our father’s rejection and preference for Lucy, and second from our mother’s emotional abandonment.”
    Carly finally learned about Andrea and Ronnie in 1955, when Ronnie was drafted into the U. S. Army and sent to Europe. That summer, Andrea sailed to France to be near him, telling her family that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and needed to get away awhile. Auntie Jo was brought in to look after the family, much to the consternation of Carly and Peter, as Auntie Jo was somewhat strict. Once, she took a hairbrush to Peter’s backside, something he never forgot.
    While his wife was away, Dick Simon suffered a massive heart attack, one that almost killed him.
    Andrea didn’t come home right away, remaining in Europe while her husband recovered. Her sisters told Carly why. Carly was shocked.
    “They said she was madly in love with him,” she recalls. “They talked about my father and Auntie Jo, that this was our mother’s revenge. I was a child in denial. Even though I saw it in front of me, I couldn’t bear to believe it’s true…. Looking back, I see now that we lived in an atmosphere of erotica. The sexual haze was so thick you could cut it. The whole thing gave me a very good sense of smell, and a sensitivity to peoples’ secrets.”
    For the next fifty-plus years, the Simon sisters (and their various psychotherapists) referred to all this as “the Ronnie material.”
    When Andrea Simon finally returned home, she found the family in a terrible state. Joey, eighteen, was openly contemptuous. Lucy, fifteen, was cool to her. Carly’s stammer had reached the point where she could hardly speak. So Andrea plunged back in. When Carlystumbled over a word, Andrea encouraged her to sing it instead, which sometimes helped. The “worry lump” made it hard to swallow, and Carly had lost weight. She had become obsessed with her sexuality and had made up pet names for her female parts. She loved keeping (and not keeping) secrets, and told anyone who asked that she wanted to be a spy when she grew up, and indeed eavesdropped on Joey and her dates, crawling behind and under the living room furniture to see what Joey was up to. Carly often tried to peek at Lucy while she was dressing to see her developing bust, which Lucy was shy about revealing. (“I was completely in awe of my sister’s breasts,” Carly said later.)
    One morning, Carly freaked out at the breakfast table. She was eating Cheerios and telling her mother about the air-raid drills at school and her fears of airplanes and bombs. Then she had a panic attack. “I ran upstairs and started whirling around the bathroom. I wanted my mother to call the ambulance because I thought I was going to die. My mother somehow subdued me and got me into bed. I think I must have cried it out.”
    Andrea took Carly to the pediatrician, and Carly overheard her mother telling him, “Carly is often hysterical”; she later looked up the word in the dictionary. The doctor wanted Carly to be evaluated by a psychologist, and this led Andrea to send Carly to twice-weekly sessions with New York psychiatrist Edith Entenmann. By then, Carly was in the sixth grade at Fieldston, a private school in Riverdale. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Carly was excused early from class to go to the doctor. She felt shame at this, and indeed was somewhat stigmatized. Teachers told her