Jan
The novel of this proposal, Jan, is the second I have written in the project. It deals with the sexual pilgrim's-progress of "Jan," a 48-year-old physician who experiences a calamitous LSD trip during the 1967 "summer of love" in New York's Lower East Side and is briefly confined to a Vermont sanatorium. Trying to piece her life back together, she starts up an alcoholics' treatment home in the New Mexico desert and comes to discover the curative powers of her sexual orgasms – sweetened by micro-doses of LSD. This revelation of sex, sex as a spiritual/curative dynamic, such as manifested by many tribal cultures, by Tantric practices, and by the ancient goddess religion of the Middle East, defines her relations with the men under her treatment but ultimately leads to violence and madness and attempted pagan sacrifice and suicide — from the ashes of which, however, rise a strangely redemptive vision.