Will there really be a morning: An autobiography

This chilling self-portrait of the once well-known actress who spent much of her adult life in a state mental institution is one of the most forthright, harrowing self-analyses of schizophrenia that have ever been recorded. Acknowledged as one of the world's most beautiful women and critically acclaimed as an actress, Frances Farmer suddenly toppled from stardom and plunged headlong into the terror-ridden world of the insane. With uncomfortable candor she documents the brutal details of those isolated years in a mental hospital and her solitary struggle for reality. When she was released after seven years of horror, many of them spent in the animal cages of the violent ward, she was driven by a poignant determination to recivilize herself and survive. Under an assumed name and cut off from any ties with the past, she worked in a small town in northern California. Three years later she moved to San Francisco and took a job as a reservation clerk at the Palace Hotel. When she was recognized as Frances Farmer, newspapers across the country printed the story that she had been "found". Offers came from television and movies, but she was hesitant to resume her former career. However, she used a guest appearance on This Is Your Life as the wedge to carry her back to her first love, the stage. Summer stock brought her to Indianapolis and to a point in her rehabilitation where she could undertake her own local television show and play lead roles in Midwestern theaters. Still struggling against her destructive other self and the terror that constantly threatened to engulf her, she gradually inched her way into a world she had never known, a world of lucidity and serenity. In the strength and calmness that surfaced during her final, physical illness, Frances Farmer reaffirmed that despite the twisted nightmare journeys, life itself is something of value and a reason for survival. Her unadorned, searing narrative was completed a few days before her death.