Joan de Frenay Love in the Fast Lane

Annotation

Set in the artistic and literary Bohemian hey-day of Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s, Love in the Fast Lane is the passionate memoir of a young, aristocratic Irish woman's rebellion against convention and her awakening to love and her own sexuality. Former Christian Science Monitor columnist, writer, and noted Tarot card reader, Countess Joan de Frenay paints a vivid portrait of a hidden era in Irish history (long before the 1960s) when Dublin served as a refuge for a bohemian pot-pourri of draft dodgers, artists, film-makers, writers, out-of-the-closet homosexuals, drag queens, occultists, and proponents of utopian free love. Penniless but ever ingenious, the intrepid author and her beloved Pekinese named Wang, survive evictions, near-starvation, pre-Pill birth control in a staunchly Catholic country, pneumonia, gas meter readers, and Brendan Behan drunkenly gate-crashing her parties, as she searches relentlessly and uncompromisingly for truly requited love.