Review of Strange Days for Enchanté

“Death does not part...”

Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison
by Patricia Kennealy. Dutton, 1992, 450pp., ISBN 0-525-93419-7.

"I kneel there [at his grave] all day . . . Out of my need as well as his, I do rituals, for the terrible truth, apparent to me as soon as I reach out for him, is that he is still here. His presence is so vivid, so tangible, that it seems impossible that I cannot touch him physically. It is a devastating feeling to know him so near, to sense him so lost; but even more devastating is the realization that I will have to send him on myself. . . .

"And it is fine and fitting that I should do it, I have no complaints about that: I love him, he is my handfast mate, I am a priestess and I know how it should be done. And since no one else seems to have seen the necessity ("There was no service," one of them said airily to the press, "we just threw some flowers and dirt and said goodbye"; yeah, about what you'd do for your dead parakeet), it becomes my place and my place alone to do this for him.

"For I see at last that if it did not occur to anyone else to do this for Jim, then no one else but me can or even should be doing it. This, then, is why I had to come to Paris: No one else saw the need, the duty that is for those left behind . . . It is my job to obtain for him safe and protected passage, a smooth crossing; and though indeed I have never ceased to work but to that end since first he came to me that night, I now begin my work in loving earnest." (Strange Days pp.324-5)

I am kind of intimidated to be reviewing this book -- I'm afraid I won't be able to do it justice. Yet justice must be done, and Justice, if nothing else, is what this book is about.

Essentially it is a romance, albeit by mainstream standards an unconventional one. Yet those of us who've spent significant portions of our lives on the road --where all our relationships become long-distance: intense periods of drowning together, and then time apart spent living through the phone and the mail-- will recognize it instantly. It is also instantly recognizable to those of us who've struggled to have a relationship of equals with another strong-minded, creative, intense individual; and to those who, for good or ill, have struggled with their own or a partner's self-destructive, addictive behaviour.

Many of us had heard rumours of Jim Morrison having been handfasted to a (real) Witch, and wondered if this (and she) was for real. Fans of Kennealy's fantasy series The Keltiad had their own opinions in the matter, of course, but it can be hard to tell with fantasy writers. So, for what it's worth: Yes. She's for real. Oh, yes.

For those of you who have seen Oliver Stone's movie The Doors: No, the film was not accurate. Stone betrayed Kennealy, Morrison, and the Craft, plain and simple. (Well, actually his betrayal was grandiose and complicated, but you know what I mean...) It was Stone's betrayal that was the last straw for Kennealy -- it led her to finally break her long-held silence on the matter: to tell her side of the story and, among other things, to answer point-by-point all the strange and libelous rumours that have been told for over twenty years about Morrison, herself, their relationship and their involvement in Celtic Paganism.

While this book is deeply Pagan and Celtic, with a reverence for the Goddess and the responsibilities of a Priestess interwoven throughout, it is not a "how-to" in anything but example. It is more like sitting up all night (and on into the next day) listening to an Elder Priestess, who also happens to be a consummate storyteller, speak in gut-wrenchingly honest terms of her life and her time with her handfasted consort -- in all its beauty, tragedy, and perverse humour.

This is not a eulogy in the sense of being high praise for the departed and high praise only. It made me think instead of Orson Scott Card's idea of the Speaker for the Dead: a person who sees past pretense, is deeply familiar with the human mind, and committed to speaking the deep truth -- often forcing people to not only re-evaluate their perceptions of the dead, but also their perceptions of themselves and the times in question (in this case the late sixties and early seventies, with all their dazzling breakthroughs and stupefying pratfalls -- strange days, indeed). It is a deeply loving and compassionate testament, simultaneously critical and even brutally honest, and somehow all the more loving for this openness. An intimate, honorable, and blisteringly funny book, by a gifted bard with the heart of a warrior, and the talent to pull the reader into the maelstrom and bring them back out in one piece again, exhilarated and changed.

--Kathryn Theatana