Throughout my career, I’ve strived to challenge myself when opportunity arises. I moved to London as a foreign correspondent with a year-old child, the first mother at my newspaper to work abroad. I left a comfortable position in Philadelphia to helm the Forward in New York.

And now I’ve taken on the challenge to write an interpretive biography of a musical icon who is brilliant, accomplished, and complicated: Carole King. 

This book was quite a journey. Though I’ve admired her music since Tapestry was released, I wanted to understand it from the inside out. To do that, I studied piano for two years, which enabled me to dissect her musicality and describe what musicians call the “Carole King chord.”

This is why I am a journalist – to immerse myself in a subject, and relay what I’ve learned with passion and integrity. I first became fascinated with the craft in my teens, when I watched televised reruns of the crusading reporter Edward R. Murrow. I can do this, I thought. After all, I love to write, I am nosy, I am curious, and I believe that words and images can help change the world. 

This driving ambition helped me climb the ranks of newsrooms from Connecticut to Virginia to Philadelphia to New York. I have been the first woman in more positions than I can recall. For that, I credit the trail-blazing women who came before me, the men who took a chance on me, my husband for supporting me, and plain old good timing.

Carole King was her own kind of trailblazer — she often led recording sessions in a studio full of men as she defied expectations of what a woman can and should do. I can relate. Often being the only woman in the room deeply shaped my outlook, too. It made me aware of the stories we weren’t telling and the perspectives that escaped our attention; it also made me try hard to pay it forward, and to help younger women achieve their own professional dreams.

But this ambition was always tempered by my devotion to family, and my constant worry that I was forsaking one thing I loved for another. 

Ambition and anxiety, accomplishment and regret – all those conflicting emotions have laced through my personal and professional lives. That’s one reason I was drawn to write about Carole King. She faced that juggling act from the highest levels in her field. “My baby’s in one hand, I’ve a pen in the other,” as she memorably wrote.

Read Carole King: She Made the Earth Move and see for yourself.