Loose Woman: my odyssey from lost to found

Loose Woman tells of the life-changing year, 1979, when Beth Kaplan, a successful young actress, surprised herself by agreeing to live and work with a group of intellectually disabled men in a community in France. In this candid, sometimes hilarious memoir, she leaves behind a theatre scene that’s rife with drugs, sex, and unsuitable men to embark on an extraordinary odyssey of self-discovery and redemption. 

Kaplan brings to life the late seventies, when feminism and sexual liberation were ascendant, and a single woman had to come to terms with what this new kind of freedom meant. Long before the #MeToo movement, she offers an intimate view of the triumphs and miseries of a woman in the acting profession and her struggle to emerge from the shadow of a controlling and abusive director and a domineering father.

Loose Woman illuminates how, with the help of her intellectually disabled French housemates, a gifted, damaged young woman begins, at last, to trust and forgive herself, to live loosely, and to set off in a surprising new direction.