In the aforementioned documentary, we come to know that if she was in the mood for sex, Simone recognised that she was happy. Her expressions were unique to her even if they were weird to all.įor instance, to measure the wellness of her marriage and even mental health, Simone would gauge her libido. She feared distortion anytime she poured out her soul. Simone herself always feared she would be misunderstood. One hopes not to be paternalistic but leave room for individuals to interpret their agency. There is a certain kind of difficulty in discussing what sadism means to subjects like Simone. Incidentally, Simone herself was a victim of an abusive husband who was her manager. These and others marked a pattern of aggression that fractured Simone’s relationships. To make her point clear to the cashier, Simone pulled out a gun. One-time friend of Simone’s, Janis Ian, also wrote in her autobiography Society’s Child: My Autobiography that Simone once threatened a store cashier to take back a pair of sandals Simone had worn already. So she shot and injured him with an air gun. In 1995, Simone felt her neighbour’s son’s laughter was too loud. She had been trying to kill him because she suspected that the company was duping her on royalties. In 1999, when she sat down with Tim Sebastian on BBC’s HARDtalk, Simone narrated that in 1985, she shot at a record company executive but missed. Writing for The Guardian, Dorian Lynskey makes the point that her diagnoses came “long after her volatility had inflicted irreparable damage”. She was problematic to those closest people to her that has to be said.īut how much of the problem she gave was hers to give? As the self swung like a pendulum between mania and depression, how much of reality did Simone fail to grasp? The biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, explained that Simone was on medication at that time and this was known to a few friends.īut bipolar disorder also makes for a more nuanced conversation on who Simone was and at what time. However, in a biography released a year after her death in 2003, Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan argue that Simone had been aware she was mentally unstable at least, in the 1960s and not later. It would seem the confoundment that she visited upon a watchful world had been given back to her. She said she was disappointed to find out that late in her life. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the 1980s. In 1970, another comparable legend, Maya Angelou would write of Simone: “She is loved or feared, adored or disliked, but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation.” Her essence was both things.įrom To Be Young Black and Gifted to I Love You, Porgy, Simone’s greatness was palpable.Īnd then, one day, she told Martin Luther King Jr., “ I am not nonviolent“, taking the trouble to let MLK know she will go where he is hesitant to go for civil rights. Like a Delphic priestess, Simone brought the mirth and the mystery.
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