Love in the Fast Lane

About the Book

Set in the artistic and literary Bohemian hey-day of Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s, Love in the Fast Lane is the passionate memoir of a young, aristocratic Irish woman's rebellion against convention and her awakening to love and her own sexuality. Former Christian Science Monitor columnist, writer, and noted Tarot card reader, Countess Joan de Frenay paints a vivid portrait of a hidden era in Irish history (long before the 1960s) when Dublin served as a refuge for a bohemian pot-pourri of draft dodgers, artists, film-makers, writers, out-of-the-closet homosexuals, drag queens, occultists, and proponents of utopian free love. Penniless but ever ingenious, the intrepid author and her beloved Pekinese named Wang, survive evictions, near-starvation, pre-Pill birth control in a staunchly Catholic country, pneumonia, gas meter readers, and Brendan Behan drunkenly gate-crashing her parties, as she searches relentlessly and uncompromisingly for truly requited love.

About the Author

Joan de Frenay, writer, artist, and noted Tarot card reader, was born Joan Furlong. She grew up in the heartland of County Waterford on the banks of the Blackwater and the Bride. She was brought up by her grandparents in a very old Georgian house. Being an only child, she spent most of her time alone or with her county neighbors until she was six when her mother began to worry that Joan was “going native” and sent her to boarding school in England. Although educated in London, Joan never felt at ease there (perhaps her mother’s fears had come true). As soon as she was independent, she returned to Ireland to discover that her father had broken the entailment on her family home and sold it. With nowhere else to go, she lived in Ballinaparka Lodge in Waterford until the age of twenty, when she ran away to become a fixture of Dublin’s burgeoning bohemian society. She passed her Trinity entrance exams, but her father refused to allow her an education. She had always had a talent for writing and had received awards when she was younger and was able to use her writing in conjunction with a wide variety of odd jobs (ranging from governess to poodle groomer) to support herself. Her writing has appeared in a variety of magazines and journals, in addition, she wrote monthly articles in the magazine page of the Monitor for three years. She also authored the novella, Valley of the Bride. After turning down many marriage proposals, she finally married Comte Pierre Henry Hubert deFrenay and moved to a family house by the sea where Joan began seriously painting. For nine years, Peter cooked and Joan washed paintbrushes, until Peter became severely ill. They returned to Dublin so that Peter could get medical treatment, but he died in 1985. Presently, Joan divides her time between her family home in County Waterford and her flat in Rathmines in Dublin.