Love Him Madly: An Intimate Memoir of Jim Morrison (Book Review)

Love Him Madly: An Intimate Memoir of Jim Morrison paints a wonderful portrait of Morrison's love life and how the rock icon was off stage and out of the spotlight with the people he thought he loved and the people who loved him.

The book is written from the perspective of the author, Judy Huddleston, who's obsession with Morrison sees her passionately unrational at times as she wages an inner war and what she believes is true love.

Huddleston goes into to detail with every conversation putting the reader in the room with Judy and Jim. From the pillow talk to the drug infused incoherencies of a live free or go home hippie, everything is distinctly real and genuine.

Especially telling is the turmoil in Judy's mind between love and hate, and how easily she was able to have her feelings and emotions melted away at the mere sound of Jim's voice. 

Delving deeper into the abyss of Morrison's soul, the reader is able to understand the loneliness and utter depression of one of the world's biggest rockstars. Filling his life with mind altering substances, booze, and a plethora of woman, some he "loved" and others he forgot, Morrison was truly a tortured artist.

It started innocently enough, a fresh out of high school girl's infatuate crush of someone unobtainable. After attending a few Doors concerts and getting lucky enough to meet Morrison back stage after a show, she was hooked. Morrison became her drug of choice.

Leading the pack as some sort of head groupie, Jim took a liking to Judy and frequently called her when in town or when he needed late night action. However, Judy was different. She had a conscience, she had a soul, she wanted to be intimate with Jim on another level besides the physical. She usually obliged for fearing of losing him or for the chance to make him love her.

Their rendezvous became something sort of like a spiritual revelation as they became one in the physical, metaphysical, and sometimes mentally, but never emotionally. Jim was cold to the emotional stakes of love and the oneness and specialness of intimacy.

Regardless of some of these setbacks and the little jealous and non-chalant games they played together over the years, they had some sort of hypnotic spell that kept them coming back for more.

Judy was committed to this relationship despite Jim's non-comittment to anything. The only things he seemed to come back to was Judy, albeit in between a herd of other girls who couldn't connect with him or intrigue him mentally.

Towards the end of the book and ultimately Jim's life, an expressed profession of love was said between the two. Honesty started to flow between the two of them, there was hope for Judy's dream. At that time however, the drugs and the alcohol became to much for a mere mans body. He became gaunt, disheveled and unstable. His oozing sexuality and "god-like" stature was gone, he was the shell of what was.

Morrison's untimely death in Paris was the end of Judy's childhood, and although one life seemed to come to an end, her life really just began. She was free to be a person not bound by a life of inconsistency. Jim was alive in her memory and in every facet of her senses, and that affection would never grow stale.