I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood

Beatrice Woods' life was extraordinary in every way, from earliest childhood, when her dominating Victorian mother realized she "wasn't like the rest of them," to her productive life in old age in California's Ojai Valley, where she lived and worked until her death in 1998 at the age of 105. Rebellious, radical and romantic, Wood was determined to be an artist. She fled to Paris for several bohemian seasons as a painter and actress, then returned to New York where she fell into the loving clutches of two French men: Henri-Pierre Roche, the author of Jules and Jim, and Marcel Duchamp, the iconoclastic Dadaist. Her promising youth was followed by a disastrous marriage, financial woes and a debilitating physical affliction; but in 1933 at the age of forty, she discovered the passion that would change her life: pottery. One of America's acclaimed ceramicists, Beatrice Wood shares the intriguing details of her unconventional life in "I Shock Myself". With candor and insight, she recollects nearly ten decades of world-shaking events, heart breaking romances, and artistic achievement. She gives us rare glimpses into the lives of such significant innovators as Duchamp, Roche, Constantin Brancusi, Isadora Duncan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anais Nin and many others. She recalls the early days with Theosophist Annie Besant and the young sage Nytyananda Krishnamurti. Above all, it is the mystery of love, sex and romance that intrigues Beatrice Wood and fires the her imagination.