You’re Vain singer Carly Simon reveals Parkinson’s disease and skin cancer diagnosis
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Carly Simon says she is finally ready to talk about why she has been silent these past years.
A singer who rose to fame in the 1970s with hit songs that included You are So Vain again No One Does It Better revealed that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, while quietly battling basal cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer.
“So many people have written to me, asking kindly about my relative’s silence, asking how I am and what I have been doing,” said the 83-year-old American singer in a statement published by People on Monday. “The truth is, I was learning how to live with Parkinson’s disease.”
Simon explained that his “problems started” when he developed arthritis in both knees and one hip, which resulted in him needing three surgeries. Despite this, she says her walking continued to worsen to the point where she “couldn’t walk without a lot of help.”
“My family and I knew something else was going on. After extensive testing at the Mayo Clinic, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s,” he said.
“It took me a while to understand the diagnosis, get used to it and decide how much I wanted to say publicly about it,” he continued. “Parkinson’s is different for everyone, and it can be unpredictable. Some days I’m so tired I can’t get through the day at all. On others, it gives me little room to move, think, work and feel like myself.”
Cancer treatment
Simon added that at the same time he was dealing with those feelings, he was also being treated for cancer on his face. The two-time Grammy winner, who was last seen in public in 2019, said that while the cancer was removed, the surgery changed her appearance and made her “very self-conscious about being seen in public.”
“I’ve been more critical of my appearance than anyone else can imagine (see the irony of him writing ‘You’re So Vain.’),” the singer wrote. “And this gave my inner critic a lot of new things.”
She said “withdrawing from society was the sweetest reaction,” when she considered Parkinson’s disease, the surgery and “all the emotional consequences.”
With the eclipse just days away, you may remember that singer Carly Simon talked about Nova Scotia and the eclipse in her iconic song, You’re So Vain. But how come he refers to the province in his song? CBC’s Richard Woodbury visited Carly Simon at her home on Martha’s Vineyard to find out.
There is no cure for Parkinson’s, a neurological disease that robs people of control over their movements and affects more than 120,000 people in Canada and 10 million people worldwide.
Simon says that while his loss of mobility and the anxiety and depression that comes with the diagnosis have been “one of the hardest things to explain,” it’s not over. [her] he lives” and “he hasn’t stopped working.”
He said that in the middle of all this he is recording a new album called It comes in waves.
“That sounds mysterious to me,” he said. “Music has always known when to come. It has saved me too many times to count.”
Although the singer doesn’t think “Parkinson’s is a gift or a blessing,” she’s “learning to live with it.”
“These days I walk a little, I depend more on others than before, and I have learned to accept that every day will look different,” she said. “But I’m still very much there.”
