Abruptly psychotic at 24, Susannah Cahalan, AB ’07, was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, when in fact she had a rare type of brain encephalitis.
When she recovered, she wrote a New York Times bestseller, Brain on Fire (Free Press, 2012). The story could have poured out as pure emotion, but Cahalan insisted. on researching what happens when the brain is broken.
For her next book, she was, understandably, intrigued by a Stanford psychologist who sent healthy people undercover into mental hospitals. That one took six years of research, unearthing so many discrepancies that the biography turned into an exposé. The Great Pretender (Grand Central Publishing, 2019) is now taught in universities as a cautionary tale.
Still interested in the brain and its altered states, Cahalan was reading about counterculture legend Timothy Leary at the New York Public Library when she came upon a smaller collection: the papers of his ex-wife, who edited his work and preserved his legacy. Rosemary Woodruff Leary’s story had never been told.
Cahalan pored over her diary, unpublished book and photographs. She slipped on her necklace and gazed into her mirror (lent by Woodruff Leary’s brother). A childhood in St. Louis and mystical experience at age eight; disastrous early marriages, charismatic lovers and the tumultuous years with Leary; an eager but cautious relationship with psychedelics — Cahalan dug into all of that. She even tried to reconstruct the quarter-century that Woodruff Leary had spent underground, living at poverty level, to avoid going to prison or testifying against people she loved.
Cahalan wrote The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary (Penguin Random House, 2025), she began to understand even the times “when Rosemary lost herself and made ridiculous decisions.” Twice divorced by age 22, in the 1960s? “A life with 2.5 kids in the suburbs was already out of the question,” Cahalan says. “Her life wasn’t going to be simple.” Nor would it be easy. Woodruff Leary left high school without graduating, had no cash and “was in pursuit of the ineffable, with a lot of narcissists around her.”
“I was an English literature major at WashU, but I wanted to dabble.”
She was a seeker, and Cahalan respected that. Like her subject, Cahalan is fascinated by the potential locked inside our minds. Its promise shines through the book’s intense and complicated characters, its trippy sex and rock n’ roll, and its cameos by Nixon, Chief Crazy Horse and the CIA. The Acid Queen is that marvel: a serious, insightful cultural history that is a fun read. For Cahalan, it proved a “much more intimate writing experience than the other two books — even though the first one was about myself!”
Her next project? A book on cognitive dissonance. “I was an English literature major at WashU, but I wanted to dabble,” she says, still grateful for the university’s multidisciplinary emphasis. Learning about evolution, philosophy, psychology and macroeconomics left her comfortable with ideas that otherwise might have thrown her. “Those years stoked a curiosity that was already there,” she says, “keeping that fire lit.”
