“When I used to get blue years ago, James Baldwin would say the same thing to me each time: ‘This is the world you have made for yourself, Nina, now you have to live in it,’” the trailblazing musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone muses in the opening lines of her 1992 autobiography, I Put a Spell on You.

Throughout this slight, remarkably placid autobiography (co-written with Stephen Cleary), one sometimes wonders—almost with relief—whether these words are actually the voice of Nina Simone. Could this possibly be the same tortured musical prodigy whose mental illness and irrational actions are brutally and heartbreakingly documented in Alan Light’s 2016 biography What Happened, Miss Simone?—a book inspired by the harrowing 2015 documentary of the same name?

But then, like flashes of lightning, Simone reveals her aching loneliness—her insecurities, her rage, her passion, and her inability to explain her oftentimes hurtful actions. A classically trained pianist who begrudgingly became “the high priestess of soul,” Simone knew people thought she was strange. Still, she found a way to connect and inspire through her extraordinary gifts, leaving behind a body of work which reveals unflinching, universal truths.

“When a person moves to their own kind of clock, spirit, flow, you’re always in congress with yourself. The challenge is, how does the congress around you accept you?” her friend Attallah Shabazz asked Light. “How does royalty stomp around in the mud and still walk with grace? Most people are afraid to be as honest as she lived.”

Carolina Girl

Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933, in the small resort town of Tryon, North Carolina. Her mother, Mary Kate, was a pious and renowned preacher, while her jaunty father, John Divine Waymon, was an entertainer turned entrepreneur who had fallen on hard times due to the Depression.

Simone recounts her family life and the relatively integrated, bucolic Tryon in the most sentimental, emotional, and clear-headed portion of I Put a Spell on You. As Simone recalls, her parents and siblings were considered “exceptional” in both the Black and white communities. Little Eunice became the Waymons’ brightest star at two and a half, when she taught herself to play the family organ. “Momma came into the living room and heard me playing one of her favorite hymns, ’God Be with You Till We Meet Again’ in the key of F. She was so surprised she almost died on the spot,” Simone writes.

Simone shared a special bond with John Divine.One gets the sense her entire life was spent trying to recapture the security she felt with her father, who made her laugh and loved to watch her perform. “Daddy’s favorite was ‘The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,’ and he’d sneak up in the day when Momma was out and get me to play it,” she writes. “He’d sit by the window or outside on the porch, and if he saw Momma coming down the road he’d whistle—the signal for me to switch to a more righteous tune.”

The Prodigy

Simone’s obvious gifts would soon become serious business. Her mother’s employer recognized Simone’s genius and paid for her to take piano lessons with Muriel Mazzanovich, an affectionate, tactile woman whom Simone came to see as her “white momma.” After hours spent practicing Bach in Mazzanovich’s airy, elegant studio, the two would play duets—“bright funny pieces that came as a welcome relief.”

Simone is at her most relatable describing the loneliness and isolation of a dutiful child prodigy: the punishing hours practicing, the lack of formative friendships, and the pressure of representing her race. To further her protégé’s education, “Miz Mazzy” started the Eunice Waymon Fund, and the entire community of Tryon—Black and white—chipped in. “The direction of my life was determined by their ambitions and their money, and I was promised a future I had no part in choosing,” Simone writes. This direction would include boarding school (where she was valedictorian), Julliard, and then, it was hoped, a spot at the renowned Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

But the sheltered Simone occasionally, spectacularly found her own voice. In I Put a Spell on You, she recounts a solo recital for her backers at the age of eleven. She was all set to play when she saw her parents being removed from their seats so a white family could take their place. “I …stood up in my starched dress and said if anyone expected to hear me play, they’d better make sure that my family was sitting right there in the front row where I could see them, and to hell with poise and elegance,” she writes. “The day after the recital I walked around feeling as if I had been flayed and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But the skin grew back again a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.”

An Education

By 1950, Simone was studying at Julliard, and admittedly feeling awkward and out of tune with the glamorous and sophisticated women of Harlem and Brooklyn. She was further alienated when she was rejected by Curtis, which she believed was because of her race (though Light notes there are differing opinions on the reason).

While teaching piano in Philadelphia, Simone learned that her much less talented students were getting summer gigs in Atlantic City. To evade her religious mother’s wrath, the stage name “Nina Simone” was born. Her first residency was at an Atlantic City dive called Midtown Bar and Grill, where the innocent Simone ordered a glass of milk and only started singing when her employer insisted.

She quickly developed a following, with a group she refers to imperiously as “my students.” Painfully insecure offstage, she relished being in complete control over a ragtag audience far from her dreams of concert pianist stardom. “I would get through it by closing my eyes and pretending I was somewhere else, like Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera,” she writes.

Simone was soon a nightclub sensation, especially in vibrant, intellectually and musically stimulating Greenwich Village. She had a hit record with her 1957 version of “I Loves You, Porgy.” She was married to a beatnik named Don Ross, during which time her sister Francis recalled, per Light, she was drinking heavily and experimenting with drugs.

“Life blazed, and for a moment I thought I had everything I wanted,” Simone writes of these heady times. “After shows people would crowd my dressing room, leave flowers, kiss me and say they loved me. Men I had never met before, handsome men, said they loved me and I almost believed them—I wanted it to be true.”

Revolution

Simone’ s career would really take off after she married a tough, business-savvy, and abusive ex-policeman named Andy Stroud in 1961. “The way I looked at it, if I married Andy, he would be able to protect me from everything but himself,” she writes.

With Stroud managing her career, Simone became increasingly involved in the fight for civil rights, counting among her mentors James Baldwin, Odetta, Langston Hughes, and her dear friend Lorraine Hansberry, with whom “it was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls talk.”

With songs like “Mississippi Goddam” and “Young, Gifted, and Black,” Simone earned the moniker bestowed on her by Stokely Carmichael: “the only singer of the civil rights movement.”

“People who lived through those times doing the same things I did, living and breathing the revolution, will tell you the same stories of how their private lives faded away for years at a time,” she writes. “The first thing I saw in the morning when I woke up was my black face in the bathroom mirror, and that fixed what I felt about myself for the rest of the day—that I was a black-skinned woman in a country where you could be killed because of that one fact.”

While recounting her involvement in the movement, one can feel Simone loosening up, relishing the human connections she made during the 1960s. With dark, twisted humor, she jokes about performing on a stage made of coffins in Alabama and attempting to seduce Louis Farrakhan after becoming obsessed with his tiny feet. She was especially amused when singer Johnny Mathis, who always bragged of having been a high school track star, sprinted off a stage when it collapsed, thinking (understandably) it had been bombed by racist agitators.

Yet Simone, whose vulnerability and fickle nature are evident in numerous contradictory passages throughout I Put a Spell on You, also admits to feeling like an outsider within a movement to which she gave so much. “I was lonely in the movement like I had been lonely everywhere else. Sometimes I think the whole of my life has been a search to find the one place I truly belong.”

The Betrayal

As Light notes, this alienation was undoubtedly not helped by Simone’s increasingly debilitating mental illness. She was later diagnosed as bipolar.

Though Simone is sparing when discussing her mental instability, she does describe her first real breakdown during a tour with Bill Cosby in 1967. “Andy walked into my dressing room and found me staring into the mirror putting make-up in my hair, brown make-up, because I wanted to be the same color all over,” she writes. ”He tried to get me to talk sense, but I said things like…I was Grandma Moses…I had visions of laser beams and heaven, with skin—always skin—involved in there somewhere.”

By the late 1960s, Simone was lashing out, heartbroken in part by the stagnant struggle for civil rights. “America betrayed me, betrayed my people and stamped on our hopes. Andy had betrayed me too,” she writes. “I felt like I was being attacked on all sides: the whole world was ganging up on Nina Simone.”

Simone retreated to Barbados in 1969, leaving behind Andy and their daughter, Lisa (who asserts she was physically abused by Simone). Even more inexplicably, she abandoned her beloved father after overhearing him brag that he had supported her family growing up, though it was her mother who had really kept them afloat. “I walked into the kitchen and told him he wasn’t my daddy anymore because I disowned him. From that moment I had no father,” she writes.

She held true to her vow. While her father was dying, Simone recalls staying in Tryon with Mazzanovich. Despite her family’s constant appeals, she refused to visit him on his deathbed. The day he was buried in North Carolina, Simone was performing in D.C., singing a song she just written about him which ended with these cryptic last lines: “When he passed away, I smoked and drank all day. Alone. Again. Naturally.”

Exile

“I had done things I could not explain to people I loved most…I couldn’t go home without explaining myself, and I didn’t know how,” Simone writes. “The truth was I had no home anymore.”

After recounting the death of her father, I Put a Spell on You becomes increasingly erratic and disjointed, mirroring the chaos of Simone’s life during the 1970s and 1980s. As Light notes, much of the book is dedicated to men Simone believes could have saved her, although she does not mention the many affairs with women her family and friends claim she enjoyed.

For a time, she was the mistress of Barbados Prime Minister Earl Barrow. “I was his courtesan and he was my pasha,” she recalls. She then moved with Lisa to Liberia, where she felt a wild sense of freedom and descended into hedonism and divadom At one party, which inspired her joyful song “African Calypso,” she stripped naked and danced for two hours, fueled by champagne.

But according to guitarist Al Shackman not everyone was thrilled to have Nina in Liberia. “They couldn’t stand her in Africa,” he told Light. “Her maids—oh, she was just awful. If she were a queen, the streets would rumble.”

During these tumultuous years, Simone became increasingly hostile towards her audiences, once chasing a fan in Casablanca out of a show with a knife. She found occasional solace and compassion with other bright lights—an understanding, reverential David Bowie and her old friend James Baldwin, who touchingly helped her during a show in New York.

“Song after song collapsed midway through, with Simone complaining about the microphones and the lights, until eventually Baldwin came out and sat with her onstage,” guitarist Al Schackman recalled, per Light. “He said, ‘Nina, I think you should sing,’ and she replied, ’James, yes, of course—I like you, I know you like me, so if you think I should sing, I will sing.’”

To The Bitter End

By the early 1980s, Simone was down and out in Paris. “Living in a tiny apartment, Simone would stand on the sidewalk in front of various Latin Quarter nightclubs and invite passersby to come in and see her perform,” Light writes.

Eventually Simone rebuilt her career and began taking medicine to treat her mental illness. But she remained volatile and reactive, aware that her emotions were often out of control.

Despite the turmoil, Simone claims in her autobiography to have had no regrets.

“I know she felt like she was alone, and she was still fighting while everybody else was happy that they had gotten their certificate,” Lisa told Light. “She never stopped speaking out against injustice. I think that Mom’s anger is what sustained her, really what kept her going. It just became who she was.”

Nina Simone died at her home in the French seaside town of Carry-le-Rouet on April 21, 2003. At last, she was at peace.

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