My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I had not read any of Eileen’s work before but was so impressed with this book i’m sure I will in the future! She has a wonderful eye for detail, you get under her skin in this book, it’s a biography of sorts but the kind of biography I love, it doesn’t just take you through the day to day, it delves into the mind, the thoughts that are running through her brain as she deals with life in New York in the 70s. She lives in an apartment in New York, meets the great and good who reside there, It always amazes me how some people find their path through life, she was working in an office and realised she didn’t want to spend her life sat there, so off she went and lived a life of sex, drugs and poetry in New York, at first sleeping with men but then having the feeling of falling in love with Rose, and her whole opened up. She describes their first encounter as leaving her feeling ‘a sense of being not correct but aligned for the first time’. A wonderful description of finding your true path in life.
I have seen in other peoples reviews they have said they preferred the first part of the book, but actually I loved the latter pages. There are some amazing streams of consciousness to be found, I made a note of some of the ones that particularly struck me.
‘The possibility that i should keep living in this particular time in which i was born, not bleeding into all the other times, hear this footstep not that. Feel the possibility and let it leak.’ p221
‘The thing of great value is you. where you are, glowing and fading while you live’
The book is full of such great insight, not just into Eileen’s life, but people’s perspectives. I sent a link to her website to a poet friend of mine in LA and this was the wonderful response I got from him regarding her work..
“She also makes some good points and other artist like her do as well. The stories through out the world we have told slant us jade us towards a prejudice. We are slanted towards male female and anything suggesting otherwise is suppressed. We put down these stories and we all grow up with a certain prejudice that we have to overcome if we want real liberation. How can any loving presence create a universe where two people who love each other are forbidden to embrace each other to touch to fuck to do whatever they want as long as they do not hurt each other.
What kind of Divine love. What kind of God would that be and would you want anything to so with being who is all beings like that. I certainly would not but I did not start this way i grew to this and this is the dialog that is needed and an honest realization that we need real stories new stories written not out of fear but out of kindness and love.”
©Stephen Kalinich
And he hasn’t even read the book yet!!!!
Read it now! it will alter you in ways you had not expected!
