Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience » (Subsequent)

Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz are the directors of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, the only library in the world exclusively devoted to the literature of mind-altering drugs.

Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer are the directors of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, the only library in the world exclusively devoted to the literature of mind-altering drugs. Michael Horowitz was Timothy Leary's archivist and is coauthor of The High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs. Palmer and Horowitz live in northern California.

• An anthology of writings by some of the most influential women in history on the often misunderstood and misrepresented female drug experience.

• With great honesty, bravery, and frankness, women from diverse backgrounds write about their drug experiences.

Women have been experimenting with drugs since prehistoric times, and yet published accounts of their views on the drug experience have been relegated to either antiseptic sociological studies or sensationalized stories splashed across the tabloids. The media has given us an enduring, but inaccurate, stereotype of a female drug user: passive, addicted, exploited, degraded, promiscuous. But the selections in this anthology--penned by such famous names as Billie Holiday, Anais Nin, Maya Angelou, and Carrie Fisher--show us that the real experiences of women are anything but stereotypical.

Sisters of the Extreme provides us with writings by women from diverse occupations and backgrounds, from prostitute to physician, who through their use of drugs dared cross the boundaries set by society--often doing so with the hope of expanding themselves and their vision of the world. Whether with LSD, peyote, cocaine, heroine, MDMA, or marijuana, these women have sought to reach, through their experimentation, other levels of consciousness. Sometimes their quests have brought unexpected rewards, other times great suffering and misfortune. But wherever their trips have left them, these women have lived courageously--if sometimes dangerously--and written about their journeys eloquently.

Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz are the directors and founders of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, and coeditors of Aldous Huxley's Moksha. Mr. Horowitz is proprietor of Flashback Books in Petaluma, California, where both authors reside.

Cape Times

It is scholarly yet not academic, exhaustively researched, and contains an indispensable bibliography. The spectrum of substances documented is comprehensive. For the adolescent, the general reader, the psychonaut, the literary/social historian, or the lone wolf looking to find a home on Mars, Sisters of the Extreme is an indispensable and insirational work.