Susan Lydon

Lydon was born to an American Jewish family in The Bronx. Her father was electrician Sam Goldenberg, and her mother was Eve Samberg, a singer at resorts in the Catskills Mountains; they married in 1942. Sam left to serve in the U.S. Army in Europe in 1943, and Lydon was born in November while he was away. She was named by her mother for actress Susan Hayward.

After her father returned in 1945, the family welcomed two more daughters, Lorraine (1946) and Sheila (1949). In 1952, they all moved to Island Park on Long Island, to live in the newly built suburbs, and they changed their surname to Gordon. Son Ricky was born in 1956; post-partum woes added to the bouts of depression that had come over Eve in 1955. In 1961 at age 17, Lydon was sneaking out of the house to nightclubs, and smoking marijuana. Despite these peccadillos, she earned a full scholarship and entered Vassar College in September 1961 to study history. At Vassar, she started taking diet pills containing amphetamine, and continued to smoke marijuana. She met Michael Lydon, a student at Yale University. In 1965 she graduated from college and married Michael.[1]

Michael and Susan Lydon moved to the UK to work in journalism. He wrote about British affairs for the American magazine Newsweek. As a freelancer, she submitted fashion pieces for London Life magazine, the newly adopted name of the Tatler, published weekly during the Swinging Sixties.[2] She also wrote for The Times.

The two left London for San Francisco at the beginning of 1967, just in time to witness and report on Michael Bowen's Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, where they dropped acid (lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD) and listened to Timothy Leary tell the crowd that people living in cities should reorganize as tribes and villages.[3] Lydon enrolled in graduate studies at San Francisco State University, but she soon dropped out of school.[2] She wrote for Sunday Ramparts, a supplement of Ramparts, connecting with Jann Wenner, the arts editor. Wenner was starting Rolling Stone, and he recruited both of the Lydons to assist with managing the project. Michael Lydon thought he was hired as managing editor, but this position was taken by Herbert "Hirk" Williamson. Susan Lydon refused menial, secretarial assignments suggested by Wenner and instead wrote reviews and articles. She helped edit and produce the magazine.[4] She gave the magazine its slogan "All the news that fits" which she lifted from an April Fools issue of the Columbia Daily Spectator, writing "All the news that fits we print", a parody of The New York Times' slogan, "All the News That's Fit to Print".[5]

Lydon's daughter Shuna was born in March 1968, and she left Rolling Stone, writing for a short-lived Hearst periodical titled Eye aimed at the youth market. Helen Gurley Brown took over Eye as editor, and chastised Lydon for writing so much about sex, drugs and politics. Lydon accepted assignments from The New York Times Magazine, and she edited a biography of Huey P. Newton for Ramparts, later recalling the day when gun-toting Bobby Seale guarded the Ramparts office building while Eldridge Cleaver was smuggled out of the country. In late November 1968, Lydon attended the first women's liberation conference at Camp Hastings in Lake Villa, Illinois, at which 200 women's rights activists met.[5] Lydon separated from her husband in January 1969, taking her daughter to Berkeley to live with Ramparts contributor Tuck Weills for six months.[6] In December 1969 she was at the Altamont Free Concert to report on the Rolling Stones and the music scene, but she was appalled to witness there the death of the "good vibes" of the sixties.[5]

In her childhood, Lydon did some knitting, but she became more serious in college.[17] In 1992 while birdwatching in Napa,[6] she broke an arm and shoulder in a fall, and she used knitting as physical therapy. She became an avid knitter, and wrote about the subject, humorously questioning whether she was a "Master knitter or demon knitter. You be the judge."[18] Her best work was a series of shawls woven in a feather-and-fan pattern from qiviut, the fine inner hair of the muskox. She traveled the world to interview knitting women of various cultures that had retained the history and custom of knitting.[2] From this material, she published two books: The Knitting Sutra (1997) and Knitting Heaven and Earth: Healing the Heart With Craft, the latter published in June 2005 just prior to her death in July.[6] She likened knitting to prayer beads ("one prayer for each bead or each stitch") and devotional meditation: "I crave more deeply a communion with nature, with palpable works that emanate from the hands of God. I am a woman... I know how to pray with my hands, and I need those prayers to connect me with the earth."[19] Lydon led knitting workshops at various places including Esalen.[19]

Beginning in 1990, Don Katz began interviewing Lydon and her birth family the Gordons for his book Home Fires, published in 1992. The book was hailed as an unvarnished look at the struggles of a typical post-war American family in which the children rebelled and developed into adults in ways that were not foreseen by the parents.[20] At the same time, Lydon started writing a memoir about her own life, published in 1993 as Take The Long Way Home: Memoirs Of A Survivor. Lydon's memoir focused on the more troubling aspects of her life, especially drug abuse, addiction, and incest.[4] The Los Angeles Times reviewed the book as "extremely brave and moving".[4] Lydon named her alcoholic grandfather as the likely malefactor of sexual abuse committed when she was two years old. Lydon was conflicted, certain that something bad had happened to her, but pleading "How will I ever know for sure?" Laura Shapiro of The New York Times was unimpressed with Lydon's revelation of childhood incest, accusing Lydon of a "fatal fondness for easy answers." Shapiro opined that Lydon had failed to achieve the perspective of objectivity, despite her years of self-analysis at Arica.[21]

Lydon retreated every summer to a cabin on the Russian River to write, knit and birdwatch with women friends. She regularly spoke to recovering drug addicts about her experience. In 1994, Lydon had a kidney removed to treat renal cancer. In 2002, she took medical leave from her newspaper to fight breast cancer with chemotherapy and radiation. Treatment continued until April 2004, when liver cancer was discovered.[6] In what would be the last weeks of her life, she went to Boca Raton in Florida to enter hospice and be with her sister, brother, mother, and daughter.[4] She died of liver cancer on July 15, 2005, at the age of 61.[17]