The Acid Queen

'An electrifying portrait . . . These star-studded pages give us the life of the true "acid queen" and the iconic presence of her era' JENNIFER CLEMENT, author of Widow Basquiat Rosemary Woodruff Leary, or the 'Acid Queen' as she was named by Allen Ginsberg, tested the limits of her mind and the expectations for women of her time. Yet she has been remembered only as the wife of Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor-turned-psychedelic high priest whose jailbreak captivated the counterculture and life on the run inflamed the U.S. government. But Rosemary was more than a mere accessory. Drawing from a wealth of interviews, diaries, archives and unpublished sources, Susannah Cahalan reclaims Rosemary's narrative from those who dismissed her. Page-turning, revelatory and utterly compelling, The Acid Queen shines an overdue spotlight on a pioneering psychedelic seeker - a woman 'with her feet on the ground and her head in the sky' - and rewrites the era from the perspective of an extraordinary woman.

Susannah Cahalan