Joan. Marush. A Biography.

About the Book

This is the story of Joan, a teenage American girl whose life was almost derailed by ballet obsession and eating disorders. By moving to Paris in 1959 and hitchhiking all over Europe throughout most of the 1960s, Joan succeeded in “finding herself ” and discovering abilities and competencies she hadn’t previously been aware of. She chronicled her odyssey of self-realization in hundreds of letters home describing her adventurous travels and the richness of her educational, artistic, and cultural experiences 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 series of oral history interviews, which describe her transition from the lovely but subdued Joan to the more 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 eyewitness to Marush’s subsequent forty-five happily-ever-after years as a 100%, to-the-core New Yorker who could have been happy nowhere else.

About the Author

Clifford D. Conner is a historian and a biographer. He taught history of science at the School of Professional Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of A People’s History of Science (2005) and The Tragedy of American Science: From the Cold War to the Forever Wars (2022). Cliff has written two biographies of Jean Paul Marat, a primary leader of the French Revolution. He has also written biographies of Irish revolutionaries Arthur O’Connor and Colonel Edward Marcus Despard.