Until the announcement last month of her first album in 16 years, Carly Simon had been keeping a fairly low profile.Today, in a heartfelt and good-humored letter to fans, the decorated singer-songwriter revealed two reasons why: She has been living with Parkinson’s disease and recovering from successful skin cancer surgery.
“Some days I’m so tired I can’t get the day moving at all,” Simon writes of her Parkinson’s symptoms.“On others, it gives me a little more room to move, think, work, and feel like myself.”Simon noticed signs of Parkinson’s during her recovery from multiple knee and hip replacement surgeries due to arthritis.
As months went by, mobility issues persisted.“Once seated,” she writes, “I could feel as though I had been swallowed by the chair and might remain there permanently, like a guest who had badly overstayed her welcome.”Since the formal diagnosis, Simon has reckoned with the psychological toll of the chronic illness while receiving treatment and medication for its physical effects.
“Parkinson’s is usually associated with movement, tremors, and balance, but it can affect much more than the body,” she writes.“It can bring anxiety, depression, exhaustion, and apathy.
The apathy is particularly strange.You can find yourself lying there like a starfish drying in the sun, arms pointing in all directions, while nothing inside is telling you to get up, read, watch, write, sing, call someone, or do much of anything at all.
That has been one of the hardest things to explain.It is not simply sadness or laziness.
It is as though the part of the brain that sends out invitations to participate in life has temporarily misplaced the guest list.”At the same time as the Parkinson’s diagnosis and treatment, Simon underwent surgery for basal cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer, on her face.Although the cancer was removed, she writes, “the surgery affected my appearance and made me more self-conscious about being seen...