leonard cohen, man next door

  Tuesday, 17 July 2012 The Unholy Messiah September 21, 1980. I had decided to come back to Hydra and save Leonard. It's difficult to look back at the silly young woman who did all this mainly because she was in love at the time. Also, I had just come into some money, i.e. a Canada Council grant to write a novel. The first thing I did with it was buy a ticket to Greece. A few months earlier my mother had died, of complications from a 15-year battle with arthritis. My father had died of a heart attack six years earlier. I was 29, remarkably naive but also fairly sensitive, and heading into my first Saturn return. Not that these are exactly excuses, but they help me to distance myself from my reckless self of thirty years ago. I was very prone to dreams, back then, and some of my dreams were precognitive. Or rather, I would receive information in them that would later prove accurate. I was also eccentric enough to base some of my decisions and actions on

FULL TEXT OF MY INTERVIEWS WITH MICHAEL POSNER FOR HIS BOOK "LEONARD COHEN: UNTOLD STORIES"   --  with corrections added and highlighted in yellow.  A   Did anyone ever mention that he would glitter in conversation? It was like something took him over that was very shiny. Those were the moments I learned to distrust the most. —Ann Diamond ANN DIAMOND: He seemed oppressed by a weight of some sort. He’d entertain you, but you’d sense something burdening him. He’d talk a lot about his depression and how unhappy he felt—this “veil of tears,” this “disaster that we’re living in.” ANN DIAMOND: I had started running into Leonard that summer. He’d stop me and look like he wanted to talk, but I didn’t have a very good feeling about him. The second or third time, I felt bad about it and told Peter Katountas, and he said, “I’ll give him your phone number.” PETER KATOUNTAS: That afternoon, I’m walking home and who’s coming along but Leonard? I said, “Apparently you were cas

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...I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl I said, "You don't know me now but very soon you will..."   Someone sent me this article in August 2020 -- it was the first time I had seen it. Leonard never mentioned it to me. Maybe there are reasons for that. I know Leonard was scared of journalists and liked to have protection set up when they came around.  So I met Leonard in November 1977. Stephen Williams interviewed him that same week on November 11. (Remembrance Day was not yet a holiday in Quebec and it fell on a Friday of a week I was working in a bank downtown, which happened to be the week Leonard phoned me up and invited me over for tea). I was 26, temping for a living - as a temporary secretary I only ever worked in one bank and only for that one week. So yes that is me  - I was very tall and thin-- but if I was fasting it would probably have been near the weekend, a fleeting experiment not a habit -  I have no memory of Stephen Williams  whom I did actu