Love Him Madly

May 1, 2013
A memoir of a tempestuous affair between a young art student and a tortured rock god. Huddleston (Creative Writing and Integrated Arts/California State Univ., Monterey Bay; This Is the End, My Only Friend: Living and Dying with Jim Morrison, 1991) returns to the subject of her first book: her intimate relationship with the Doors' singer and leader. The perspective of 40 years since Morrison's death has stripped the author of some of her delusions of youth. Still, apparently relying on diaries from the era, she captures the fresh confusion of emotions she felt each time her path crossed his during their four-year relationship. As an 18-year-old, she harbored the very square fantasy of marrying her lover/idol, a fantasy she knew to keep to herself; she knew he had a longtime relationship with Pamela Courson (whom she identifies only as "Pam" in the book). Huddleston eventually learned that her own relationship with Morrison was in fact far from unique and meant nowhere near as much to him as it did to her. If there's an added value to the book for Doors fans, it may lie in the author's vivid portrait of the mercurial Morrison, whose persona could metamorphose from that of a vulnerable little boy to a sexual sadist in a matter of seconds. Readers will catch on fairly quickly that Morrison was never interested in Huddleston as much more than a sexual partner. From her first intimate encounter with him (which ended in a brutal anal rape) to the last some months before his death in Paris in 1970, she doesn't get any closer to answering the question of who Morrison really was or why he was so psychically wounded. Best read as an antidote to the usual Morrison hagiographies by adoring critics.

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