My thanks to Inner Traditions/Park House Press for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Psychedelic Refugee’ by Rosemary Woodruff Leary and edited by David F. Phillips. Its subtitle is: ‘The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run.’

Phillips provides a good summary of this memoir: “While most accounts of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been told by men, with this memoir we can now experience these events from the perspective of a woman who was at the center of the seismic cultural changes of that time. Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935–2002) was one of the great female psychedelic pioneers of the 1960s. She met Dr. Timothy Leary in 1964, becoming his psychonaut partner at the Millbrook estate and later his wife. After Timothy’s prison break in 1970, Rosemary fled with him to Algeria, beginning a years-long fugitive journey across four continents and nearly 25 years underground.”

In his Editor’s Introduction, Phillips writes about his process of rescuing Rosemary’s memoirs, which at her death were left unfinished and somewhat fragmentary and also the rules that he followed editing them. He was clear that he wasn’t writing a biography and instead used copious footnotes to annotate Rosemary’s words.

Her written manuscript ended in 1972 with the remaining thirty years either unwritten or lost. However, Phillips found the transcript of an extensive 1997 interview with Rosemary by author Robert Greenfield in the archives containing her papers and included this with Greenfield’s approval to round out the memoirs.

‘Psychedelic Refugee’ is very stream-of-consciousness and I felt that it conveyed a real sense of Rosemary’s voice throughout. As the text was deliberately left unpolished it had a rawness and authenticity that made it a highly engaging reading experience.

I was a teenager in the 1960s and by my late teens I considered myself part of the counter culture. So many of the people and events in this book were familiar to me. It was a memorable time to live through.

I felt that Rosemary, who was close to the heart of it, presented a fascinating first hand account especially of what life was like with such a notorious figure as Leary. I was especially interested to read of her involvement with the occult, this included her desire to use the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot as a framework for her memoirs.

An insiders view of politics, government and drugs through the eyes of a woman who lived it.
Rosemary Woodruff Leary was a cultural pioneer of art, music and the New York City Beats and literati in the 1950’s. Her interest in consciousness and psychedelics began before she met Harvard Professor Timothy Leary in 1964. With an invitation to his Millbrook Estate she would became his psychedelic partner and eventually his third wife. There she played a critical role in the setting and shaping of the psychedelic movement and LSD experimentation. Although her contributions were ignored in the public eye, Leary would be quite open about it. Their relationship was plagued by a series of drug arrests and eventual imprisonment of Mr. Leary. Rosemary, with an appeal pending worked tirelessly with radical groups and individuals to plan Leary’s 1970 prison break. This led to Ms. Woodruff’s twenty three year life in hiding throughout the United States and abroad and within these pages Rosemary shares it all. We meet cultural leaders, learn of her insights and psychedelic experiences and her surrender to California authorities.
This is a wonderful read and very recommended.
My thanks to NetGalley and Park Street Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest book review.

A rather strange book.. As is noted in the text, it was a very hard book to put together and, unfortunately, this comes across in the disjointed text.

The psychedelic era of the sixties seems long ago. For those of us that lived through those tumultuous times it is hard to explain what they were like to those who never knew real freedom or the innocence of breaking new ground. The war in Vietnam, the civil disobedience that was going on, the racial awakening of many peoples in the cities and the reservations. I remember those times. So when this book became available I jumped at the chance to learn about Timothy Leary and the founders of the new consciousness movements. Drugs were and are a mainstay of the health of most people. The fact that some drugs were considered not worthy of study because they dont fit into the political views of the mainstream is still going on today. All that said I was unable to put this book down. From Algeria to California the story and the characters tell a story that was true then and still is today. This book tells Rosemary's story , A story that needs to be told because it contains the truths and the fallacies of politics and laws and drugs. If you lived then , much of this will sound familiar. The raids , the groups trying to find freedom, the strife. If you didnt live then you will find it still interesting but more than that you will learn how all of this impacted a person named Rosemary.

This is supposedly Rosemary Leary's story in her own words, but there are so many intricate, detailed footnotes from the person who is publishing these journal entries and letters home that it distracts from the writing. There is no flow and the entries jump around from year to year, from the US to Europe. What is clear is that Rosemary protected and basically worshipped Tim Leary for many years, much to her eventual dismay. This comes across in the journals and letters. Very tedious read.

I found this very moving. It is a memoir of the Sixties, that strange and wonderful time, despite the sexism that dogged it, before the world descended even more into a Kali Yuga, with Covid, wars and, no doubt, worse to come. This memoir reminds us there is still hope, and that the Earth is more complex than we give it credit for, and we can come out of this, just as we came out of the fifties and the world wars that preceded the fifties. The decade was not perfect, but it was full of optimism. Anything seemed to be possible. This memoir captures that mood perfectly, and I would recommend it expecially to those who want a woman's view of the times.