Paper Daughter by Jill Johnston

A dense, analytical, self-dramatizing memoir. Johnston details how she responded to this untenable situation: 'Between '65 and '69 I lost my mind three times, furthering my resolve after each episode to strengthen my ego.'

In her long periods of psychosis, Johnston felt 'airborne,' heard voices, had an acute hysterical pregnancy; she surrendered to elaborate delusions about her unknown father and grandfather--involving Christ, Freud, LB J, English royalty, and (above all) French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. She spent chunks of time in Bellevue and St. Vincent's, became more or less addicted to Thorazine, devoted most of her time to sleeping--while continuing to cover the avant-garde scene for the Voice, in increasingly haywire pieces. Bolstered by her fantasies, by 1968 she 'turned into a fool or a dancing bear'--parading in male drag, cultivating the rich and famous, embracing the world of gay bars and quickie sex: 'Divorcing love from sex in relation to other women was invaluable to my becoming less (emotionally) dependent on the sex that had dominated me.' ~ Kirkus Review