Her later wish — expressed clearly in the My Love Story memoir and in interviews connected to it — to not be defined exclusively by the story of what she survived is the counterweight to the 1981 disclosure. She had told the story. The story was now out. The culture’s appetite for retelling it was apparently inexhaustible. What she asked for, in her later years, was the recognition that the full story of her life was larger than any one chapter of it, however significant that chapter was.
The request was not fully granted. The stage musical is named Tina, and its narrative center is the departure and the comeback. The public conversation about her legacy, in the years surrounding her death in 2023, returned inevitably to the arc that the 1981 People interview had initiated. This is not, in itself, a failure — the arc is real, the story is significant, and the culture’s interest in it reflects something genuine about what the story illuminates. But Tina Turner’s wish to be more than her survival is worth honoring by making visible the full scope of what she chose to be: not just the person who left, but the person who built.
## The Library of Congress and the Long Reckoning with “What’s Love Got to Do with It”
In 2020, the Library of Congress added “What’s Love Got to Do with It” to the National Recording Registry, its annual list of recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The registration placed the song alongside recordings that the Library of Congress has determined warrant preservation as part of the national cultural record.