Mary Stewart Anthony set her memoir on the rugged coast of Big Sur, a place where she dropped out of sight, society and her mind. Love Song of a Flower Child is the story of a Hunter College graduate who felt trapped in the Big Apple in the late Fifties and took flight to Berkeley.

The oldest of eight children, the renegade Catholic school girl joined the merry band of pranksters and hippies in the Sixties before escaping into a wilderness of spiritual experimentation in Big Sur. There the single mother of two children tried to fit into the Big Sur mythos, living on top of a mountain, searching for truth, and hoping to contact aliens.

Powerful places help shape our psyches

© Michael Rhea | Dreamstime Photos

“Berkeley was too crazy for the dreamy, poetic student I was,” Mary says, “and Big Sur seemed too beautiful to be real, like a fantastic dream just out of reach.”  What New York City, Berkeley, and Big Sur had in common, she discovered, was a striving energy and a blurred social consciousness.

The San Francisco Book Review characterized Mary’s memoir as “a very earnest and candid portrayal of a woman’s dire journey for purpose, fulfillment and self-realization through the times of bohemian culture and lifestyle and with several spare plunges into occult studies and practices,” and a “charged tale of her downward spiral, from dropping out of college, uprooting and separating completely from her New York home, an abusive marriage and substantial experimentation with psychedelic drugs…”

About that time Mary writes, “I felt hemmed in by this thick concentric circle of dope smokers, pimps, and madmen, an onlooker who was a prisoner of her own rebellion.”  Despite the influence of drugs and the dark magic Big Sur worked in her soul, Mary regained her faith and never lost her poetic sensibility.

Mary Stewart Anthony

“The vastness of California lends itself to an incredible variety of storytelling. I came here as an escapee from the concrete jungle to a land flowing with extraordinary beauty, aptly named God’s country by East Coasters. I fell in love with Steinbeck’s writings early on, but did not view him then as a California-style writer. My literary traditions were grounded in the Greek and Latin classics, French romantics, Irish poetry and drama, and the great Science Fiction writers like Heinlein, Bradbury and Asimov. The West was still a mysterious wild place that finally hooked me.” 

Today, Mary is drug free and back in her right mind, but she is still hooked on California. She lives near Yosemite and her recent inspiration is John Muir. “I have rediscovered Nature, “she says. John and I have hiked the John Muir trail, a life-changing experience for sure.

First excursion to Yosemite 

“My eyes ached as I looked upwards, stunned by a pure beauty untouched by man, something I had never seen before. Then I understood why I had traded the concrete monoliths of New York for this primal grey magnificence that sparkled with ice, etched in feathery trails of snow. White bone-chilling water gushed out of dark rocks and canyons and made a ceaseless roar. My every muscle strained upward in awe at a sky overflowing with endless stars. One evening, I started to climb up some jagged boulders in my ballet slippers. Wine had warmed and emboldened me. It didn’t feel odd to be without gloves, hat, or boots. My friends were laughing at my sudden frenzy to climb, but called me back before I made a serious misstep.”

Part two of her memoir will take place in Steinbeck territory, Salinas, California, a place she and her husband John called home for 20 years. After that, she hopes to write about life in a Mars pioneer colony.