Semiotexte

Elizabeth LeComte: Alright, I want to know something and I want the straight dope. Were you ever in the sack with this guy?

Ann Rower: With [Timothy] Leary?

Willem Dafoe: Oh, here it is. "Ann and I ambled up to the bedroom." [laughter]

Ann Rower: Ah, he was a liar. He's so dishonest. I mean, he was a classic paranoid. but like most paranoids he turned out to be right.

Ann Rower writes like Dorothy Parker would have if she'd taken acid to come down from speed. Funny, sad and smart, Rower's fiction is a devious transcription of life as it morphs into stories that turn into still more stories, palimpsests inscribed in a true confessional mode: a transfiction.

If You're A Girl, published in 1990 , includes Rower's story about Timothy Leary's Millbrook days, which formed the basis of The Wooster Group's acclaimed play LSD. Just The High Points. Rower is perhaps the most distinguished American writer ever to have babysat for Timothy Leary.

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“Astonishing, utterly charming and unabashedly autobiographical. If You're A Girl is as intentional as the finest fiction, yet reads like a personal letter or a conversation late at night.”

— David Ulin, L.A. Weekly