Carly Simon

Carly Simon is an American singer-songwriter, memoirist, and children’s author whose writing extends a career best known for music. Touched by the Sun, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019, recounts her friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two met on Martha’s Vineyard and developed a bond that included family life, shared friends, creative collaboration, and Onassis’s work as an editor on several of Simon’s children’s books. The title comes from a song Simon wrote for Onassis and recorded on the 1994 album Letters Never Sent. It followed Simon’s earlier memoir Boys in the Trees, which focused more broadly on her childhood, family, and musical career. Simon’s bibliography also includes children’s titles such as Amy the Dancing Bear and The Boy of the Bells. In Touched by the Sun, public fame provides context, but the central subject is the private texture of friendship, influence, grief, and artistic encouragement.