Free Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan Page A

psychology, as well as home economics and agriculture. They also spent hours every day harvesting vegetables and tending barnyard animals, and they tutored impoverished rural children. These activities put them in contact with some of the poorest people in 1930s America.
    Flora wrote extensively to her parents during her time at The Community. Often she described life in Appalachia, as in a letter she sent about a church service she’d just attended in a mountain church. The congregants, she told Willy and Esther, “have drooping shoulders. Their features are set. They are stern… . The preacher worked himself into a frenzy… . ‘God,’ he cried, ‘Help this people that is good. We are all good, God. We want to go to Heaven. Hear us—I’ve been larnin’ all these good souls here that you’ll make them welcome when they come. God, do you hear us?’” 5
    Flora was nineteen years old and already a natural nonfiction writer.
    But she fantasized about an acting career, and in 1937, as part of the study-abroad program at Teachers College, she won a fellowship to study in London, at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, one of the most famous schools in the world for would-be actors. It was run by Elsie Fogerty, a commanding eccentric. She was in her seventies when Flora arrived, and always wore a hat and a severe black dress on which, as one student recalled years later, “we could see the remnants of her breakfast.” 6
    Besides acting, Fogerty taught speech, using turn-of-the-century methods that emphasized what was then called “the voice beautiful.” That meant speaking imposingly and forcefully, using pronunciation that mimickedthe elites in Oxford and London. Hollywood and Broadway stars talked this way in the 1930s. So did announcers on the radio and rich people such as President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor.
    In a booming voice, Fogerty would order students to chant, “Around the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.” She exhorted them to “Roll those r’s! Roll them ’til they roar like lions!” 7 Flora developed her own “voice beautiful.” A pricey automobile turned into “ahhhn exxxpennnnsive nyoo cawwww.” If something was difficult to put up with, it was “jusssst toooo hahhhd to beahhhh.” This became her ordinary conversational style, even though she never did take up acting and instead decided to be a writer.
    Cracking the literary world was slow going, however. At age twenty-three, Flora was still living with her parents and could not afford to move since she was giving her writing away practically for nothing. For obscure poetry magazines and fusty journals of belles lettres, she wrote about the poet Emily Dickinson’s fear of going outdoors, and about what nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson would have thought of twentieth-century comedian Charlie Chaplin. She was paid for this work in copies of the magazines. She reviewed Broadway productions for a magazine read by college drama teachers and their students. 8 The job got her free tickets to plays, but it did not pay the rent.
    “Money is God and controls the puppets in the Greek tragedy,” she wrote a friend in frustration. “But one does hope for some
deus ex machina
—out of the relentless machine, a saving god.” 9
    Her god would turn out to be Madison Avenue.

PART II
DIAGNOSIS
     

CHAPTER 5
     
MISS MASON
     
    S CHIRLEY WAS NEATLY DRESSED, POLITE, and well-spoken at her first therapy session in Connie’s office. She was also a basket case. Eight years had gone by since she’d closed herself in her room with a hairbrush. Since then, she had received many assessments of her behavior. Mattie called her a girl with “the blues.” Her father, Walter, said she was “funny” and “nervous.” The town doctor sometimes thought she was anemic, and other times merely lonely. No one knew what to make of her numbness, twitching, and compulsive hand inspections, not to mention the