Memoir Madness: driven to involuntary commitment: Memoir Madness: Driven to Involuntary Commitment

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Prologue: Caged

[My ex-husband] may feel uncomfortable with my treatment of him, but this memoir isn’t about our life together but our life apart at a time when we wanted to be together.

-- The Politics of Memoir

(February 19, 1969)

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I was driven to Cherokee.

A hazy memory of riding caged in the back of a police car.

Two shadows in the front seat, the county sheriff and a female escort, jabbering. I, cargo, to be delivered from the Woodbury County courthouse to the Cherokee Mental Institution.

Outside, the Iowa landscape bleak:

Cloudy and cold, condensation and frost riming the windows, piles of dirty snow dotting the countryside.

Inside, hot and steamy.

Still, I shivered, my teeth chattering. Please turn up the heat!

But cargo has no voice.

For all the importance of this drive–then and now–I remember little, except for one question:

Am I really crazy?

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A slightly different version appears in Memoir Madness: Driven to Involuntary Commitment ("Prologue")

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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.

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"

...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"

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

Memoir Madness: driven to involuntary commitment

Memoir Madness