Why Karen Carpenter Matters

In the ’60s and ’70s, America’s music scene was marked by raucous excess, reflected in the tragic overdoses of young superstars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. At the same time, the uplifting harmonies and sunny lyrics that propelled Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, to international fame belied a different sort of tragedy – the underconsumption that led to Karen’s death at age thirty-two from the effects of an eating disorder. In this book, Karen Tongson (whose parents named her after the pop icon) interweaves the story of the singer’s rise to fame in the 1960s and ’70s with her own trans-Pacific journey between the Philippines – where imitations of American pop styles flourished – and Karen Carpenter’s home ground of Southern California.