Best known as the wife and partner of Timothy Leary, Rosemary
Woodruff was in fact a central figure in the psychedelic movement in her own right—a political radical, underground fugitive, and neglected architect of the counterculture. In this episode, Phil and JF speak with journalist and author Susannah Cahalan about Woodruff Leary’s life and legacy. Cahalan’s new book, The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, brings its subject into focus as a complex and courageous individual whose story has been overshadowed for too long. The conversation follows the threads of the biography while branching into the weirdness of biographical writing, the ongoing relevance of the 1960s counterculture, the troubling figure of Timothy Leary, and the enduring promise—and peril—of psychedelics.
Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire, a memoir about her experience with autoimmune encephalitis. Her second book, The Great Pretender, which investigated a seminal study in the history of mental health care and diagnosis, was shortlisted for the the Royal Society's 2020 Science Book Prize. She lives in New Jersey with her family.
Photo from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at UCLA, via Wikimedia Commons.
REFERENCES
Susannah Cahalan, The Acid Queen
Weird Studies, Episode 189 with Jacob Foster
Marion Woodman, Canadian feminist author
Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & '70s
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Eric Davis, TechGnosis
Lutz Dammbeck, The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet
Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography
Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay
Blanche Hoschedé Monet, French painter
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
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