Barbara Gordon, whose bestselling 1979 memoir of prescription pill abuse and a mental breakdown, I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, was adapted into a movie starring Jill Clayburgh, died April 7. She was 90. The New York Times reported that the book "found a wide audience in an era when prescription drug abuse was far less well known than it is today, when checking into 'rehab' to kick an addiction was not nearly so commonplace, and when mental illness carried a far greater stigma in work and social life."
In 1975, when she was 40, Gordon was an Emmy Award-winning documentary writer and director at WCBS in New York, with an addiction to 30 milligrams a day of Valium, which a psychiatrist had prescribed for her anxiety. "When she told her doctor that she wanted to stop the pills, he assured her they were not addictive and instructed her to quit 'absolutely cold.' Instead of easing off the medication, Ms. Gordon spiraled quickly downward to the edge of psychosis. Unable to work, she spent months in two mental hospitals," the Times wrote.
Gordon began writing her memoir in 1977, after leaving the second hospital and discovering she couldn't find work in media. "Maybe it was stigma, maybe it was timing," she observed, "but I couldn't find a job in the business I had worked in for 20 years."
Her memoir, an indictment of American psychiatry, sold more than two million copies. She described herself as "a victim of the individual and collective ignorance of a profession that, because it is essentially unmonitored, attracts into its ranks a brand of charlatan that wouldn't dare practice in other branches of the medical establishment."
Harper & Row paid a modest $7,500 hardcover advance, but I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can was a big bestseller. Paramount paid $200,000 for the film rights and Bantam bought paperback rights for close to $500,000.
Gordon wrote two other books, the novel Defects of the Heart (1983) and Jennifer Fever (1988), a work of pop sociology about older men in relationships with younger women.
Although most of her therapists had been men, Gordon also wrote in detail in her memoir about her sessions at the second hospital with a female therapist she called "Julie."
"I have a haunting, almost obsessive picture in my head, Julie," she recalled saying in one session. "Thousands of women all across the country being given pills by male doctors. Men sedating women, tranquilizing them, helping to rob them of themselves. It's obscene."