No one can deny the influence Carole King’s music has had on the industry — unless you don’t know who Carole King is, and then that’s another issue entirely. I really don’t think anyone can even argue the enjoyability of the biographical musical, “Beautiful” (really great show if you haven’t seen it, which most haven’t, because it’s impossible to get tickets for).

The show follows the trajectory of the Carole King’s start in music — her partnership (both romantic and professional) with Gerry Goffin and the songs they wrote for a collection of artists of the time. The voices and popularity of The Drifters and The Shirelles, as we’re shown, really helped to launch King’s and Goffin’s careers. Though the plot is rooted in the highs and lows of King's and Goffin’s relationship with the accompanying music to anchor these points, it ends with a high point.

Spoiler alert: King becomes a huge success and the music industry is forever changed.

But there’s something missing from this journey from King’s precocious ambition to sheepish personality to...less sheepish personality. What we don’t see, though, is that King’s pique of success, both in music and her sudden resolve to leave her philandering husband, is not where the story ends.

In fact, after her divorces from Goffin and Charles Larkey, King married Rick Evers. In “A Natural Woman: A Memoir,” King disclosed that Evers abused her on a regular basis. And in an interview with Piers Morgan, she confessed she’d never thought of herself as a woman who’d allow a man to abuse her — and married Evers after knowing about his destructive ways.

By ending “Beautiful” when King is at such a high in her personal life, after having spent more than a decade as a shell of the woman she once aimed to be, book writer Douglas McGrath is rewriting history.

Yes, he’s giving King the credit for coming into her own. But upon looking into her history, it appears King reverted to her old ways in later years. After the emotionally-trying marriage between her and Goffin — at least in the show’s depiction — we’re led to believe King only continued to rise in personal strength and professional influence. Researching her, though, we see that isn’t the case.

Of course, the cycle of abuse is one so many fall victim to. This article is in no way meant to judge that, merely to express that by cutting this out of King’s history, McGrath is denying that King still had room to grow after Goffin. She didn’t find herself by the time she performed at Carnegie Hall in 1971.

The show would have been infinitely stronger had the relationship with Goffin — crucial though it was in King’s life and career — been a snippet of the story. Had we been taken through her relationship history with all four husbands, not just Goffin, we would have been provided a much greater scope of who King really is and not just the lighter parts of her story. By denying this darker part of her past, we’re denying the struggles she overcame and the strength it took to overcome them, just as so many others have had to overcome the same.