Singer Carly Simon reveals Parkinson's diagnosis: "I am still very much here"

Pop singer Carly Simon shared a lengthy, candid letter about her health on Monday, revealing she has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and has spent time out of the public eye learning to live with it, the Los Angeles Times reported. The 83-year-old two-time Grammy winner said she decided to come forward because "so many people have written to me, kindly wondering about my relative silence." She did not say when she was diagnosed. Parkinson's is a nervous system movement disorder that worsens over time and has no cure; it also affects actor Michael J. Fox.

Simon wrote that arthritis in both knees and one hip led her to have all three joints replaced before her diagnosis, describing the surgeries as going "out with the old and in with delicate bouquets of metal and plastic." Her mobility worsened afterward regardless. "Eventually, there were periods when I could not walk without considerable help," she wrote, adding that a trip to the Mayo Clinic led to the Parkinson's diagnosis and the start of treatment and medication.

She described the emotional weight of the illness plainly, writing that it brought "anxiety, depression, exhaustion, an apathy," and comparing some days to lying "like a starfish while nothing inside is telling you to get up, read, watch, sing, call someone, or do much of anything at all." In the same period, she had surgery for basal cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer, on her face, and said self-consciousness about her appearance afterward pushed her further from public view: "This gave my inner critic quite a lot of new material," she wrote. Simon's two sisters died of cancer a day apart in 2022.

Despite it all, Simon, who compared herself to an "all-season" hibernating bear, wrote that "I have not stopped living, and I have not stopped working." She used the letter to promote her upcoming album "Comes in Waves," her first record of original music since 2008, due Aug. 14, with the single "Peaches" arriving that Friday. "Music has always known when to arrive," she wrote. "It has rescued me more times that I can count."

Simon closed the letter with a measured accounting of what has and hasn't changed. "I have learned to accept that every day will look a little different," she wrote. "But I am still very much here."