The Acid Queen

Named a Best Biography of 2025 by The Guardian
One of The New York Times Book Review Podcast’s “Books We’re Excited About in Early 2025”
A Town & Country Best Book to Read This April
A New York Post Best Book for Spring

“Cahalan shines a light on one of the twentieth century’s most amazing untold life stories. Rosemary Woodruff Leary blazed an astonishing trail through the red hot center of Sixties counterculture—the downtown Beats, the pioneers of hallucinogens, the Summer of Love, rock and roll royalty, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and more. With her captivating storytelling, Cahalan helps us all see this wildly misunderstood epoch of American life with new eyes. An essential read—and an unforgettable trip.” —Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road

“Rosemary Woodruff Leary was more than just the First Lady of 1960s counterculture. As this deeply researched, fun, and fascinating biography from the Brain on Fire author Susannah Cahalan reveals, Leary—who was married to psychedelic icon Timothy Leary—is no mere supporting character. Instead, the biography depicts a smart, driven, creative, and cunning woman who lived a life just as interesting, if far less known, than that of her one-time husband. After all, he wasn’t the one who broke her out of prison, was he?” —Town & Country

“Explores how Woodruff fell into her husband’s powerful orbit. . . . The Acid Queen focuses on the couple’s chaotic, drug- and sex-filled lives between their first meeting in 1965 and their split in 1971, years that included communal compounds in New York and California, arrests, jail time, a prison break and travel as fugitives in North Africa and Europe.” —The New York Times

“The Acid Queen reclaims the legacy of a psychedelic pioneer. . . . Marks yet another compelling entry in the growing body of work reclaiming the stories of women unfairly relegated to the footnotes of history.” —San Francisco Chronicle

A key a protagonist of the psychedelic counterculture, Rosemary Woodruff lived a life every bit as fascinating as her husband’s. . . . The Acid Queen is a fond, imaginatively researched tribute to [Woodruff’s] free, forever-seeking spirit” —The Guardian

“Cahalan is the perfect guide on this very trippy ride.” —Boston Globe

“Rosemary Woodruff fell into a trippy world of trickery when she met the charming Timothy Leary. A thrilling biography tells her story. . . . An eye-widening account of the madcap melange of drugs, radical politics and idealism, and the quixotic search for kicks and deeper truths that made up the 1960s.” —The Telegraph

“Rosemary Woodruff Leary was one of the great unsung heroines of the 1960s. Susannah Cahalan’s brilliant account of this woman’s incredibly courageous life in troubled times not only brings Rosemary back to life but also finally accords her the place in the history of that era she has always so richly deserved.” —Robert Greenfield, author of Timothy Leary: A Biography

“Cahalan details a piece of lost but fascinating history, the story of a woman who embodied an era of freedom, experimentation, and psychedelic adventure. Meticulously reported and beautifully crafted.” —Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

“A fascinating portrait of an unsung shero of the counterculture. I couldn’t put it down!” —Holly George-Warren, author of Janis: Her Life and Music

“Cahalan has done the world a service in restoring Rosemary’s legacy with this stellar biography, which is rich in sumptuous detail, both personal and historic, and is artfully constructed from the archives. Whether you know anything about the acid scene or are a complete novice, there is so much to enjoy in this excellent book.” —Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls

“Rosemary Woodruff Leary defied the FBI, the CIA, the American prison system and her famous husband to become a fugitive. But who was she really running from? That fascinating question looms over Susannah Cahalan’s insightful, intimate biography — part romance, part thriller, all astounding.” —Maureen Callahan, author of Ask Not

“When I finished reading this intoxicating book I both better understood the American counterculture and had exhilarating new ideas about what it means to be a woman in the world.” —Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet

“[Cahalan] excavates the consequences—psychotic depersonalization, disillusionment, personal betrayal—that accompany attempts to dissolve boundaries of self, to blur mind and substance, especially for women whose emotional and psychological suffering is too often privatized or pathologized. The Acid Queen joins the company of works that resist easy redemption, insisting that the edge of sanity is a lived terrain to understand, often with ambivalence, complexity, and cost.” —Electric Literature

“Brilliant . . . [The Acid Queen] brings Timothy Leary’s wife out of the LSD guru’s shadow.” —Book and Film Globe

“[A] vibrant biography . . . Cahalan uses Rosemary’s stranger than fiction story to offer a vivid portrait of how flower power cracked up in the ’70s. It’s an electric account of a remarkable life and the end of an era.” —Publishers Weekly

“A well-wrought narrative that brings deserved attention to a lost figure in the counterculture.” —Kirkus Reviews