Carly Simon reveals Parkinson's diagnosis, vows to keep creating

Carly Simon is eighty-three years old, and she has Parkinson's disease. She announced this publicly in a statement to the BBC, speaking with the directness of someone who has spent a lifetime turning private experience into art. The diagnosis came after years of physical decline that began, oddly enough, with arthritis in both knees and one hip. She had three replacement surgeries. None of them worked the way they were supposed to.

What followed was a slow unraveling of the body's basic mechanics. She couldn't rise from low chairs without help. Deep couches became traps—she would sink into them and feel, as she described it, like a guest who had overstayed her welcome, swallowed by upholstery. Eventually there were days when she couldn't walk without considerable assistance. Her family knew something deeper was wrong. The Mayo Clinic confirmed it: Parkinson's, a progressive neurological disorder that affects the brain, nervous system, and muscle control. About 153,000 people in the United Kingdom live with the condition. It is the fastest-growing neurological disease in the world.

Simon has also undergone surgery to remove a cancerous growth from her face. The procedure was necessary, but it changed how she sees herself. She became more self-conscious about appearing in public, more aware of her own appearance in a way that felt newly acute. There is a particular irony in this for someone who wrote "You're So Vain," a song built on the architecture of scrutiny and judgment. She has always been harder on herself than anyone else could be, she said. The surgery gave her inner critic fresh ammunition.

Parkinson's is not a single experience but a collection of unpredictable ones. Some days she wakes exhausted, unable to generate momentum. Other days offer more room to move, to think, to work, to feel like herself. The disease brings medication and treatment, but also episodes of anxiety, depression, and something harder to name: apathy. She described it with precision—lying there like a starfish drying in the sun, arms pointing in all directions, while the part of the brain that sends out invitations to participate in life has misplaced the guest list. It is not sadness. It is not laziness. It is something else entirely, and it is one of the hardest things to explain.

She did not call Parkinson's a gift or a blessing. "It is neither," she wrote. "It is difficult, frustrating, and sometimes frightening." But she has not stopped living. She has not stopped working. She is still writing, still singing, still imagining. She moves more slowly now. She leans on others more than she once did. Every day looks a little different. She has learned to accept this without feeling that she has surrendered something essential.

Simon decided to speak publicly about her diagnosis after receiving letters from people wondering about her silence, asking how she was, what she had been doing. The answer, it turns out, is that she has been making music. A new album called "Comes In Waves" is due in August 2026. The first single, "Howl," came out last month—a song about consoling a friend through heartbreak, her tawny contralto voice unmistakable even now. The album revisits the themes that have always defined her work: love, memory, family, self-reckoning, forgiveness. It makes room for contradiction, ambiguity, emotional evolution. She is still very much here, she said. Still writing. Still singing. Still occasionally getting trapped in an overstuffed chair.