A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future

by Anthony Peake

at reception—at listening to voices from another place, very far off, sounds quite faint but important. They only come late at night, when the background din and gabble of our world have faded out. Then, faintly, I hear voices from another star. Of course, I don’t usually tell people this when they ask, “Say, where do you get your ideas?” I just say, “I don’t know”. It’s safer.’

In addition to his five wives, he had many female friends and lovers, some of them ‘live-in’. These relationships could be, by turn, romantic, affectionate, devoted, loving, tempestuous and even violent.

And, despite everything, he would later claim, with some justification, that he was able to remain on friendly terms with all of his wives and most of the other women in his life, too.

This is obviously not true. It makes me wonder if this book was based off of skimming the author’s Wikipedia.

Vince Lusby says he witnessed fights between PKD, Jeanette and her brother, who had soon appeared on the scene, and that threats were made with regard to the destruction of PKD’s writing and, especially, his records.41 When the inevitable divorce proceedings took place, this threat to PKD’s musical collection was cited as one of the grounds for divorce. PKD was to tell his second wife, Kleo, that the judge found this to be the most ridiculous reason for divorce he had ever encountered. He said it was the first case he had ever presided over in which a phonograph record was ‘cited as co-respondent’.