In the House of My Fear: A Memoir

by Joel Agee

In the spring of 1964, Joel Agee, not quite at home in his native New York (having spent much of his boyhood and youth behind the Iron Curtain), accidentally ingests a sizeable dose of LSD. All at once he is thrown from the precincts of bohemian normalcy into a whirl of bizarre synchronicities, symbols and omens. Nothing is ever the same again. His brilliant, mentally ill younger brother is descending into a psychic netherworld without chemical inducement, and the culture at large, not to be outdone for surreal extremeness, is undergoing a mutation of its apocalypse and utopia appear to be equally imminent.
A small inheritance comes Joel’s way. Together with his wife and their infant daughter, he emigrates in search of kindred souls—a picaresque journey that takes him through Spain, England, Italy, Switzerland, and France. On the way, a fantastic project takes root in his to exorcize his brother’s madness by transforming his own consciousness, first with "acid," then in a quest for enlightenment under the tutelage of spiritual teachers. Thirty years later, a sobered Joel Agee—now the author of the widely reviewed memoir, Twelve An American Boyhood in East Germany—sets himself the task of recounting his adventures.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

416 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2004

Reviews

[Eric]

I first read part of this in the 1980s when the chapter called A Fury of Symbols, about the author's perception of being besieged by signs and synchronicities in NYC, was published in Harper's as a standalone essay. It haunted me for decades, and I regularly cited it to friends as one of the best essays I'd ever come across. A few years ago I learned that Agee's memoir, including the piece I'd so loved, had been published some years before. Unfortunately the memoir overall feels a bit bloated, but there's lots of great stuff here, and ultimately I think this is an important document of hippie philosophies and lifestyles, which in the author's case contributed to both transcendent and harrowing personal experiences.

[David Petersen]

This is a transcendental piece of lyric poetry, on par with Inferno or Ulysses, and like those, difficult at times, yet brings you, through its odyssey, to another shore.

[Carol]

I wondered how this book possibly got such a high rating...oh only 4 people have actually read it. After giving myself permission to skip the internal dialogue, I finally got through it. bleh.