Seventies survivor Frances Lynn ruthlessly chronicles the psychotic highs and lows of Alice, a young English girl who escapes London at the tail end of the Sixties for a sojourn in San Francisco.
She quickly discovers that the psychedelic world of tie-dye and joss sticks belongs to the previous decade when she becomes involved with a glitter daubed, sprawling theatre group, leftovers from the insular Haight-Ashbury crowd.
Alice gets sucked in beyond her head, but just when the crazy theatre group's popularity overdoses, she goes over the top and is shipped back to London.
By now, the early Seventies are in full decay, as is Alice. She continues her downward slide by falling in obsession with a fragmented member of the Art World. Their exhausting fling, fuelled by a cocktail of opiates is interrupted by repetitive bouts of insanity, like a San Francisco acid flashback. No holds are barred in this frantic saga of drug-fractured psyches - and it's hard to guess who will stagger on... More > into the eighties.< Less
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By Ulla de Mora
Oct 15, 2009
"Frantic by Frances Lynn" FRANTIC From heroin to Lithium and back again..before finally arriving in a village called Sanity on the other side of Blissland. There may be some survivors out there who could enjoy the powerful regression therapy this book has to offer. An informative read for would-be celebrity hunters, historians, people with various degrees of bipolar disorder, mental healthcare workers and most of all pre-teens who want to give their grand parents a heart attack. Unless those grand parents belong to the afore-mentioned survivor group, in which case I suggest they get extra copies of FRANTIC to form a domestic study circle. It's so full of visuals that reading it becomes like watching a movie. A fast and funny reading experience which left me wondering and pondering about what happened to all of us who lived through that purple haze era. Ulla Ward de Mora
