It was a sweet existence in many ways. I had my loving and beautiful boyfriend Dave, who was sort of a rock star and also the nicest boyfriend I’d ever had. I had work—nude modeling and shifting boxes in a warehouse, not at the same time. There were shows and beaches and long days filled with nothing but reading. When I got restless or Dave was on tour, I hopped trains up and down the coast with a couple of daredevil pals I’d made. But I knew I was supposed to be a student. I wrote in my diary: “Last night I dreamt I was late for school—and how!” Which was funny, but I didn’t feel funny. I felt like I was twenty-two and a college dropout twice over and getting older every day in the wrong hemisphere. I truly believed I would live outside bourgeois society for the rest of my days, nude modeling and warehouse laboring. Maybe I would get promoted to forklift driver. There was nothing in me that believed that the normal things that happened to normal people were things that were going to happen to me. I looked like a free girl—after all, I stuck my thumb out and hitchhiked all the way to Queensland—but at this point I believed I was worthless, pretty much, except maybe my looks, and I don’t think a worthless-feeling person is a free person. I read exhaustively. From Tolstoy I’d moved on to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Thomas Mann and, of all people, Doris Lessing, who made me think in uncomfortably explicit ways about girls and freedom, and the difficulty of the novels was the only thing keeping me from falling into total despair. My brain was a little hammer, looking for somewhere to fall.