Singer Carly Simon recently released a new book, Touched by the

Sun (2019), in which she reflects on her friendship with the late First
Lady, Jackie Kennedy Onassis. For those not familiar, Onassis was a woman
who guarded her privacy fiercely, likely the consequence of feeling
overwhelmed by the paparazzi frenzy associated with her public role in the
White House and surviving the assassinations of two men close to her (her
husband, John F. Kennedy, and her brother-in-law, Robert F. Kennedy).

Sources who knew her have shared that she lived for years with the fear that
her children, too, might one day be targets of assassination, a fear
or paranoia that is actually a normal response when one has watched others
close to them be killed. Onassis was a woman who, despite her wealth and
glamorous persona, experienced extreme psychological trauma.

Fast forward to 2019 when Simon wrote a book about the friendship she
shared with Onassis. In the book, Simon reveals information her friend shared
with her in confidence on topics that are extremely personal. Considering how
private Onassis was (almost never doing interviews), it's confusing in some
ways how a supposed friend can justify sharing such private details.

Psychologically, an individual's explanation of their own behavior often relies

on defense mechanisms. A person can use denial (an outright denial of reality),
rationalization (explaining controversial behaviors in a way that sounds, on the
surface, entirely logical), or intellectualization (removing all emotional content
from an explanation and focusing instead on "facts"), among others. It's
unclear how Simon explains behavior in which she divulges the secrets of a
friend to the public, but many readers appear to have had a highly negative
reaction to the book.

Reader reviews on Amazon.com, for example, reveal themes among

the reactions. Many reactions question Simon's proverbial moral code, while
others dismiss the book as boring, rambling, and in need of a co-author or
more rigorous editor. What's interesting to note is another theme in readers'
reactions: the perspective that Simon talks as much about herself as she does
about Onassis, with some readers suggesting that Simon used Onassis's
name to sell a book that is as much about herself.

If that criticism were true, the ironies would be egregious: the author of "You're
So Vain" wrote a book she said was about someone else but was actually
largely about herself. Perhaps more troubling, the author characterizes
Onassis metaphorically as a sun in the context of her life journey and revels in
having been "touched by it" (the book's title), but it may actually be Simon, in
exposing a very private friend, who burned her.

Simon has been promoting her book extensively in the media. When asked,
Simon disclosed in an October NBC News interview that she did not
seek permission from Onassis's only living child, Caroline Kennedy, to share
private details about Onassis in the book. In the same interview, Simon
explained that she never informed Kennedy that she was writing the book in
the first place.