I'm reading this book, and I must say, I'm shocked at what this woman had to go thorough. I don't see how a mother could do this to her daughter, who simply had a drinking problem! I'm only seventy pages in and I'm completely hooked, and horrified.

man, ive been looking for that book for years. can't find it anywhere.
i'll probably have to resort to amazon.com

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My mind is like a plastic bag.

i got this book at the library and ejoyed it a lot.
i heard it wasnt that accurate though. i think there's a lot of debate over that.

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I've heard it was edited by her friend Jean Ratcliffe or something. And some information is supposedly fictionalized, I'm not entirely sure though. I've read different opinions on things, but I think it's probably the most truthful account of what happened to her.

There's two other books about her

Shadowland, which has proved to be VERY inaccurate and spread that she was lobotomized; which I believe has been disproved.

and another book by her sister, which is trying to "save" her family's reputation. I don't remember what it's about, but I'm not really interested in reading it.

Catatonicx: I believe the book is about 20 bucks (in PAPERBACK!). If you have a library close to you, see if they interlibrary loan (that is if they don't have it in the library).

Its a great book. Sickly disturbing but mesmerising. This kind of thing happened all the time back then though. if women did not conform to what society expected of them, they were labelled, quite literally, insane.

The film is worth watching too, although the book is obviously more powerful.

the film was extremely powerful. especially the last part.
"frances lived as she had died, alone."

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I'm so glad we live in a society that is so much more open-minded. This just makes me sick at my stomach to think how many people were treated like Frances was, and never got a chance to be heard.

Isn't a lot of this full of errors and fallacies though? The film is also quite liberal with the truth. Frances never had a lobotomy. I also read that she was never 'mistreated' by the mental institution staff. You have to be careful with these sort of things. Not all of it's true.

^^ Lobotomy wasn't mentioned in "Will there ever be a morning" the book. I think it was implied at the end of the film.

And who is really to know what went on when she was in those asylums, could have been a lot worse than even the ghostwriter made up. They were very terrifying places!

i want to read it but i'm scared. i think it would really upset me. i mean i watched a documentary about her and i found that upsetting enough, i don't think i could handle a whole book about her. and i hate stuff about electroshock treatment, i can't read about it. it really freaks me out. i guess i'd have to skip heaps of it haha.

Yeah, the descripitions of the asylums are terrible, but they have this feeling of falseness. It sounds almost TOO horrible to be true you know? It gives me the same feeling like when I read the book A Child Called It, and I believe that was also named a hoax as well, or at least partically made up.

Thats what i find so frightening about the book;the fact that it actually happened and who knows how many women went through the same hell.I got really angry after reading it and i found the film quite hard to watch,i wanted to smash things!

I just watched the movie Frances
The movie was absolutely heart-wrenching, and incredibly sad. Why Jessica Lange didn't win an Oscar for that I'll never know.

I'm so glad she wasn't actually lobotomized, or was she? Does anyone know for 100% sure that she was or wasn't? I haven't really looked into it that much, but I was wondering if anyone here knew for sure.

Also has anyone seen this movie, starring Susan Blakely as Frances Farmer?

Will There Really Be a Morning? (1983) (TV)

Probably my favourite book ever.

Unfortunately though, Frances has made me very closed minded about acting :P

My grandparents both worked in 'mental hospitals' and told many horrible stories about what happened there, and this would have been after hospitals of Frances time.

I couldn't finish it, it was so grotesquely awful, that I couldn't finish it. I'm almost praying a lot of that was fictionalized, because of the simple fact I don't want to believe a human being actually went through such hell, in this society. I know some have went through worse, but that was just truly AWFUL. Plain and simple. It was just awful.

I'm sure a lot of the descriptions of life in asylums at the time was accurate, but when you get to the end of the book and the oh-so-soppy page after page description of the 'angel' that was Jean Ratcliffe you start to quetion it a bit, especially since she was the one who wrote it. It also never mentions a marriage! Thats quite a big chunk of life to leave out.
If you want another good and mostly factual account of life in an asylum read Janet Frame's 'Faces in the Water'.