Mariah Carey has "made peace" with her marriage to Tommy Mottola

She told the new issue of Harper's Bazaar UK magazine: "Sometimes I feel angry about that time, but I think I've made peace with it - in any case, I vowed I'd stop talking about it.

"Humour is my release, and people who know me know that. I'll make little jokes about what happened because otherwise I could make every day a sob story.

"It's a coping mechanism, but it's in my nature to laugh."

The Fantasy hitmaker felt unable to make the music she wanted to during her marriage to Tommy.

She said: "I wanted to do more R+B, more urban music, and any time I would bring that up, it would get shot down. It wasn't that I didn't like the music I was making - I just felt there was more inside me that I wanted to release."

Mariah found working on her 2020 memoir and audiobook The Meaning of Mariah Carey with writer Michaela Angela Davis a "therapeutic" experience, though it was also difficult.

She said: "Working on it together was challenging, but it was also therapeutic. We stayed up late figuring out how we were going to put the story forth. I knew it was going to bring up bad memories I didn't want to relive.

"It was a tough situation to go to sleep listening to it... I'd wake up and be kind of freaked out. Because this is me and I went through that."

Mariah's parents divorced when she was a child so her own experiences have influenced the way she co-parents her 14-year-old twins Moroccan and Monroe with their father, her second ex-husband Nick Cannon.

She said: "They spend time with him, and they have a good time; they spend time with me, and they have a good time. I want to make sure I'm always fair about the situation because it's tough to grow up with divorced parents."

Meanwhile, the We Belong Together singer is happy to embrace her diva reputation because she sees it as part of her professional persona.

She said of being branded a diva: "It's part of my job. What's the point of a disguise? Just get up, get dressed, go out. If I don't want to be seen, I'll stay home."

The September issue of Harper's Bazaar UK is on sale from 31 July. Visit https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/mariahcarey for more.