Memoir Madness
Jennifer Semple Siegel
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Jennifer Semple Siegel
The author in 1970
The author in 2005
Headed for Hollywood! (June 5, 1968)
Hollywood, California (August 1968)
August 30, 2004 (photo by author)
East Berlin, Pennsylvania (January 1969)
Jennifer's grandparents in the early 1970's
The psychedelic sixties. Sex, drugs, and hard rock. Hollywood, California. Hippies. Flower Power. Vietnam. Make Love, not War. Student protests. Hair. The Doors. LSD. Purple Haze. Women's Liberation. Richard Nixon. Cultural upheaval. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Committed against her will. From Hollywood, via Sioux City, to Cherokee: this memoir bears witness to the author's involuntary commitment to The Cherokee Mental Health Institute in Cherokee, Iowa.
Jennifer Semple Siegel
Jennifer L. Semple
The author in 1970
Jennifer Semple Siegel
The author in 2005
Why I Write
Memoir Madness
About MEMOIR MADNESS...
- Christmas Eve, 1968: Apollo 8 orbits the moon. Apollo’s astronauts broadcast a Christmas message to earth, a passage from Genesis.
- Eighteen-year-old Jennifer L. Semple embarks on a different kind of odyssey: tripping on LSD with her boyfriend Stoney, the teenager begins her remarkable journey at 2001 Ivar Street, in Hollywood, California, and ends with her fleeing Iowa, after her conditional release from the Cherokee Mental Health Institute in Cherokee, Iowa.
- “I was driven to Cherokee,” the author says, referring to a northwest Iowa regionalism synonymous with being committed to a mental institution.
- Her true story begins on the steamy streets of Hollywood, where heads, hippies, drug dealers, freaks, strippers, groupies, college students, Jesus Freaks, counterculture gurus, drag queens, rock stars and wannabe rocksters, svengalis, and con artists converge during one of the most volatile periods in our history.
- The story continues with Jennifer’s involuntary commitment to Cherokee, where she is introduced to a world of archaic psychiatric treatments, doctors, psychologists, social workers, and hospital staff. She corresponds with Jeff Brown, a new boyfriend, and also interacts with other patients: Wolfie, a psychopath who preys on other patients; Penny, a 17-year-old unwed mother; Carrie, a teen cutter with strange obsessions about rats; Joyce, a young married mother enthralled with “10 ways of suicide”; and D.J., a 42-year-old mentally challenged man and 25 year resident of Cherokee, among others.
- Finally, released from the institution, she flees Iowa, escaping to York, Pennsylvania, where Jeff awaits her.
- As the teenager narrates her story, 53-year-old Jennifer, seeking another kind of release, returns to Cherokee, this time voluntarily and as a visitor.
More About MEMOIR MADNESS
Note about the blog version of MEMOIR MADNESS
- The blog version of MEMOIR MADNESS contains selected excerpts, approximately 100-150 pages from the original 490 manuscript pages.
- Jennifer has spent over four decades contemplating this book, four years gathering her research (hospital and court records), and two years writing it.
- She has published this memoir in print and digital form; if she's lucky, she may even sell a few copies. ;=)
About Writing MEMOIR MADNESS...
Jennifer & Olive Semple
Headed for Hollywood! (June 5, 1968)
Jennifer at Grauman's
Hollywood, California (August 1968)
Cherokee
August 30, 2004 (photo by author)
Infinite Wisdom
If the doors of perception were cleansed
then everything would appear to man as it is:
infinite.
–William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
To die before you’ve reached the sky is tragedy–the sky is always an inch away from our fingertips–no matter how high we may reach. –Jeff A. Brown...The world as it appears to me is my creation, and for it I must assume responsibility. Given, as the bricks out of which I can build a universe, is a chaotic kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, sounds, moods, hopes, fears, joys, pains, ideas, movements... Out of this anarchy, I organize a world for myself. I subdue the disordered shapelessness into a world by choosing one out of an infinity of possible structures.
–Peter Koestenbaum, "Existentialism: Philosophical Anthropology"
Jeff A. Brown
East Berlin, Pennsylvania (January 1969)
Harley & Olive Semple
Jennifer's grandparents in the early 1970's
Jennifer Semple Siegel
Jennifer's Cherokee Nightmare...
Cherokee Spire, Avant garde version
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