Susannah Cahalan traces Rosemary Woodruff Leary’s life in The Acid Queen, linking psychedelic counterculture to misdiagnosis, fraud, and identity

The Acid Queen follows Rosemary Woodruff Leary, Timothy Leary’s ex-wife, showing how psychedelic counterculture shaped her life and legacy. The interview context connects Cahalan’s earlier work to the same themes of broken minds and institutional power: Susannah Cahalan’s own misdiagnosis of schizophrenia (later traced to encephalitis), and her later exposé The Great Pretender, rooted in a Stanford psychologist’s undercover research in mental hospitals. Cahalan’s research for The Acid Queen drew on archival materials and personal documents to reconstruct Leary’s childhood in St. Louis, her mystical experiences, her turbulent marriages, her cautious and evolving relationship to psychedelics, and her long underground period to avoid prison or testifying against people she loved. The result is framed as an intimate cultural history that mixes altered states with politics, celebrity, and the CIA. The piece also highlights Cahalan’s belief in the mind’s potential and describes her planned next project on cognitive dissonance.