Status Updates From Bog-trotter: An autobiograp...

this has the same disjointed quality as her first book but is less coherent. she's going into detail about her various delusions and magical thinking which unfortunately just isn't as interesting as anecdotes from her life

Somewhere this book turned from a sparse-but-likeable autobiography into a demented schizophrenic manifesto, and I think it must have been around the point of the fable of the two-headed monster and its lonely afterbirth, left hanging from a tree.

Based on her own experience of what pills can do to a person's speech patterns, Dory decides to make the 'Valley of the Dolls' lyrics very circular and repetitive: 'I was fearful someone would catch what I'd done in the lyric [...] but no-one ever mentioned it to me until a year or so later, when I was back in the hospital. That song you wrote, said a patient. Is that about somebody on reds? No, I said. Yellows.'

'During our eight-month marriage we shared a one-room apartment and a budget of a dollar a day for food. I cooked on an electric stove in the closet and regularly set my clothes on fire. [...] Long after I perjured myself to get an annulment I read a lead article about him in Variety. It said he was wanted by the European police. Because he had swindled Spain.'