'The Looney-Bin Trip'

Just finished reading ‘The Loony-Bin Trip’ - a book that took five years to find a publisher - by Kate Millet, the author of now famous ‘Sexual Politics’.  It’s an intensely personal story of Millet’s struggle to regain control over her life. For years, she was under lithium, prescribed to combat depression.  Here she tells us the story of her life in 1980 when she was trying to go off lithium. In 1965, she married the Japanese sculptor, FumioYoshimura. In 'Flying', her intimate autobiography, she tells us about her life after the success of 'Sexual Politics', which made her an instant international celebrity and her bond with her husband as well as her open relationship with women.  When she made it known in the public sphere that she was bisexual an article in Time magazine, which once hailed her as "the Mao Tse-tung of Women's Liberation", said, "The disclosure is bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her cause." She was as intensely demonised as she was lionised before. Her Irish-Catholic family comprising mother and two sisters found it scandalous. The elder sister, an attorney, succeeded in committing her to ‘the loony-bin’ where she was diagnosed to be constitutionally psychotic. However, with the help of her civil rights activist friends, she came out of the hospital, but the lithium therapy continued under medical and family watch. She has been haunted by recollections of two brief commitments--the first by a doctor, who mockingly commented, "Your only mistake was in trusting the people who brought you here". She became increasingly terrified of being "captured" again. Her nightmares came true when she was forcibly confined to a mental hospital while travelling in Ireland. 

In 1971, she started buying and restoring fields and buildings in New York. The project eventually became the Women's Art Colony/Tree Farm, a community of female artists and writers.  She now lives here with other resident artists and writers.

'The Loony-Bin Trip' is a story of betrayal and sexism, very passionately and powerfully written, but I wish she had shown less self-indulgence and self-pity.