LET'S GET ONE THING clear right from the start - this is a fabulous book. A wholly risk-free purchase for anyone with more than a passing interest in pop/rock music, the Baby Boomer years, or looking at Carly Simon in a bikini. I would certainly include myself in the last category, too - blimey O'Reilly, Carly Simon! In 1972, you looked like a cross between a fox, a peach and the nuclear bomb. You can totally see how Simon had shagged Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, James Taylor, Cat Stevens and Kris Kristofferson, and then gleefully wrote You're So Vain in a peerless piece of post-facto, willy-shrinking chick-rock triumph.

But I get ahead of myself. Girls Like Us is not just about Carly Simon, in a bikini, writing You're So Vain. Ironically for a book so deft, it is only when explaining the central conceit of the book that Sheila Weller, for a moment, wobbles. The opening chapter zooms through breakneck life-resumes of “girls” of the title: Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon, in her bikini, writing You're So Vain. Between them, Weller argues, somewhat unconvincingly, King, Mitchell and Simon embody the entire female, American postwar experience.

Simon is the transatlantic upper class - the privileged East Coast daughter of a bohemian set-up. Carole King is the lower-middle-class Jewish daughter of a fireman and a schoolteacher in Brooklyn. There's no way, however, that Joni Mitchell represents some manner of prairie-dwelling, dirt-scratching peasant class. Her father was in the Canadian Royal Air Force. She was scarcely Huckleberry Finn, living in a bush.

Still, once you've got over the superfluous opening chapter, Girls Like Us unfolds with drama and panoramic detail. Written with a keen journalistic and, more importantly, female eye, Girls Like Us works as a healthy, long-overdue counterweight to the endlessly repeated, male-sided version of rock'n'roll. After all, at the beginning of the rock'n'roll era, it was legal for husbands to beat their wives. Unmarried, pregnant girls ruined their families - “There are names they must call me,” as Joni Mitchell sang - and would need to leave town and give away her child. Bless the Beatles, but as teenage teddy boys they weren't having to put up with half of this crap.

Against this background, the stories and triumphs of King, Mitchell and Simon are all the more vivid and thrilling. King - home-maker, craftswoman, prototype Earth Mother - wrote Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? when pregnant, aged 17, and then as a divorced single mother, wrote the 22 million-selling, genre-inventing Tapestry at 29.

Mitchell - having given up her illegitimate child at the age of 22 - created a whole new prototype for women to emulate: the “thrift-shop princess, romantically adventurous yet decorous, ensconced in a...Montparnasse garrett”. When David Crosby “discovers” her and brings her to play to the rock royalty in his garden, in Laurel Canyon in 1967, the assembled mavens think that they've “hallucinated her”.

And then, of course, there's Simon - filthy, flighty, funny, boundary-pushing Simon, the “visceral among the cerebrals” - who wrote You're So Vain, hysterically described fame as “my viper - my iguana!” and wore a bikini.

Before these women broke the cultural sod during the rock'n'roll years, there were no “girls like us”. Now, there are millions.

Girls Like Us by Sheila Weller
Ebury, £18.99; 592pp

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