Joan. Marush. A Biography.

This is the story of Joan, a teenage American girl whose life was almost derailed by ballet obsessionand eating disorders. By moving to Paris in 1959 and hitchhiking all over Europe throughout mostof the 1960s, Joan succeeded in "finding herself " and discovering abilities and competencies shehadn't previously been aware of. She chronicled her odyssey of self-realization in hundreds of lettershome describing her adventurous travels and the richness of her educational, artistic, and culturalexperiences in Paris. The letters ended with her return to "real life" in the United States in the 1970s,but the narrative of her struggle to satisfy her unquenchable desire to dance continues in a seriesof oral history interviews, which describe her transition from the lovely but subdued Joan to themore dramatic Marush. And then, in 1980 Marush met and formed a lasting companionship-a"duprass," to borrow Kurt Vonnegut's term-with the author of this biography, a reliable eyewitnessto Marush's subsequent forty-five happily-ever-after years as a 100%, to-the-core New Yorker whocould have been happy nowhere else.