My download was missing pages 14-15 and pages 34-35. Abe Books's few copies go up to more than a thousand dollars. The book itself is unbelievably hard to find. She is not blind to the self-destructive side of the erotic life. But readers blinded by the bravado with she describes her sexual encounters should look carefully at the chapter set in the psychiatric ward. Schwartz considers herself a feminist, but the feminism she experienced was one of casual sex with successive partners. I think one reason many Beatles scholars dismiss what Francie Schwartz says on ANY subject is that the sexual environment she details is now alien. The AIDS crisis, becoming known to the world in 1981, brought about dramatic changes in sexual behavior. The sexual revolution Francie Schwartz describes must be hard for people born after, say, 1975, to imagine. That's where she genuinely deals with the horrors the mentally ill are subject to. Schwartz winds up, midway through the book, spending several months in the psychiatric ward at Roosevelt Hospital. I'm not certain the intention was to frighten, but when Schwartz describes her time visiting pickup bars on Manhattan's Lower East Side, I couldn't help thinking of the terror in LOOKING FOR MISTER GOODBAR. While at times boastful, the sexual antics become frightening. I mention these books because BODY COUNT, a book about promiscuity, hints at themes each of these other books have. As I read BODY COUNT, I kept thinking of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, by Philip Roth, and I was pleased to see that, toward the end, someone perusing Francie Schwartz's manuscript tells her it is a "female PORTNOY." PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT came out in 1969. Ken Kesey's novel came out in 1962, but its view of the cruelty of psychiatric wards is much the same as that in BODY COUNT. Another book this reminds me of was also made into a movie in the seventies, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. Published in 1972, it anticipates Erica Jong's novel FEAR OF FLYING (which came out a year later), and Judith Rossner's 1975 novel LOOKING FOR MR. The chief merit of BODY COUNT is that it is a prototypical example of a type of writing which flourished at the time and which has since disappeared. That she found herself with enough money to make a trip to London in 1968 so as to put a screenplay into the hands of a Beatle is almost beside the point. Very briefly, Francie Schwartz describes her time rising in the advertising world in Manhattan and Los Angeles in the 1960s. But if you have an aesthetic sense, and some intuition, I believe you will agree with me that this memoir has the ring of truth. If you are looking for footnotes, a bibliography, cross-references or anything like proof that the author experienced the things she said she experienced, you will not find it. I'm going to give this four stars out of Goodreads' possible five.
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