“I want it quiet when I sing, goddammit!’”

“I wish I could really consider it work and just do a job and not care,” she wrote in her diary in August 1964. “The truth is I’m not on the same circuit as the typical American audience. I can’t reach them unless I turn myself inside out! And sometimes it takes too much energy. And then I feel so hurt that they don’t get me. Maybe if I thought of myself as Lenny Bruce, it wouldn’t hurt so much.”

Incredible piece about Nina Simone's secret diaries, written by Joe Hagan, so smart I married him.