Sunday 26 August 2007

A "champion of individualism"? Hunter S Thompson's wife Anita fell in love with the writer when "she started working for him" but the article by Jake McGee in The Village Voice does not give a date. Thompson died in 2005 when he shot himself.

Anita has published The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson demonstrating that she is "is carrying the torch that Hunter lit, shining its glorious light onto the world for generations to come", according to McGee, who labels the book "her brand of gonzo".

How did she meet the much older man? Well: "a mutual friend introduced us because I was curious about football" since she thought "it bonds men as life friends, although they have nothing in common except football".

Anita was something of a lost soul, it seems. Her mother is "very Polish". She had gone to boarding school in Switzerland because, she says, she was "sort of getting into a lot of trouble in my teens". Then at UCLA she "started getting very political".

"I was getting very political and angry."

"I came to Aspen for the rest of the semester to ski. But then I discovered snowboarding, and I really loved the carefree lifestyle here. I was working in a snowboard shop and snowboarding every day. Then, during the summer, I was a nanny. And then I met Hunter."

What type of 'work' she did for Thompson isn't described in the piece. But she enjoyed his first book, The Rum Diary (not published until 1998). "I was fascinated by this guy's mind," she says.

Her legacy will be to promote things important to the writer: "politics, literature, history, and journalism." The new book is part of her program.

Sounds neat. Thanks to Conversational Reading for the heads-up.

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