Grafting Helen: Abduction of the Classical Past

Betty Berzon, renowned psychotherapist and author of the bestselling book Permanent Partners, tells her own incredible story here. Berzon s journey from psychiatric patient on suicide watch her wrists tethered to the bed rails in a locked hospital ward to her present role as a groundbreaking therapist and gay pioneer makes for purely compelling reading.
Berzon is recognized today as a trailblazing co-founder of a number of important lesbian and gay organizations and one of the first therapists to focus on means of developing healthy gay relationships and overcoming homophobia. Her sometimes bumpy road to success never fails to fascinate. Along the way she encounters such luminaries as Anais Nin, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Sitwells, Evelyn Hooker, and Paul Monette. Her recollections here provide a collective portrait of her fellow pioneers and a stirring lesson in twentieth-century history.
It is, however, the intimate story of Berzon s own private passage toward self-discovery from mental breakdown and suicide attempts, through hospitalization, eventual triumphant recovery, and her own coming out as an open lesbian at the age of forty that makes this memoir an urgent, insightful, and deeply emotional testament to human survival.

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Author: Matthew Gumpert
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 03/29/2002
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.36h x 6.22w x 0.99d
ISBN: 9780299171209

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2002 pg. 95

About the Author
Matthew Gumpert is assistant professor of core curriculum at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He has taught comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Harvard University. His published work includes the English translation of Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sistera's Death by Mieke Bal.