You can’t pass through Northern California without hearing about Susie Bright. She’s an unapologetic “sex educator” and author, and a cutting-edge liberal who survived the big cultural revolution in the 1970s, then made a career out of analyzing what happened next. Now she’s finally published a tell-all memoir about her life – and at least until midnight on Sunday, it’s available as a free Kindle ebook!
“I have a very scary feeling Susie Bright is not making any of this up,” joked cartoonist Alison Bechdel. The book’s title is “Big Sex, Little Death,” and it’s described on Amazon as a “stunning and courageous coming-of-age story…Susie Bright opens her heart and her life.” Though she started life as a Girl Scout, the book describes the experiences that changed her life, “including her early involvement with notorious high school radicals The Red Tide… Big Sex Little Death is an explosive yet intimate memoir that’s pure Susie: bold, free-spirited, unpredictable—larger than life, yet utterly true to life.”
I actually met Susie Bright once through a friend of a friend. (I remember that I’d told her about my teenaged crush on Annette Funicello, while she told me about the history of San Francisco’s strip clubs!) So I have to admit I was touched when I read this plea on her personal blog. “It’s my birthday this weekend, and nothing would please me more than if you’d cut a piece of cake and downloaded my book!” And according to her blog post, one of her fans is a literary superstar — Tom Perotta, who wrote the best-selling novels Little Children and The Leftovers (as well as “Election”, which was turned into a Matthew Broderick movie in 1999.) He describes her as “a one-woman counterculture, a teenaged socialist revolutionary turned Reagan-era sexual freedom fighter.”
But I think my all-time favorite story is about the time she turned up in some political coverage in Rolling Stone magazine. At one point, their reporter quipped off-handedly that Susie Bright “could not be accused of shutting up.”
Susie Bright liked the quote so much, she later made that the tagline for her personal blog!