About

Alex Aiea Black, to be perfectly honest, always supposed that she was a bit strange, perhaps even odd. However, when she came to The University of Michigan to do a PhD in chemistry and met other research chemists (like people who as children actually wanted to be research chemists), she realised how incredibly well adjusted she was after all (and often found herself refraining from using the word “freak” to describe them). She appears to her classmates and co-workers as nothing more than a quiet, conscientious, somewhat conservative student who keeps to herself, doesn’t drink, and says very little, which at this point in her life, is exactly what she wants them to them think. Her past only extends as far back as September, and her extreme need for privacy, bordering on deep secrecy, prevents her from ever disclosing to her peers what exactly it is that she does when she’s not at work.

Hippies Use Side Door is Alex’s account of the dismal life as a chemist in pursuit of a doctoral degree in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a city considered to be one of America’s “greenest.” Though the often wildly eccentric people she encounters are rarely given the opportunity to learn very much about her in the carefully guarded conversations that she has with them, her ongoing narrative reveals much about her true provocative nature: her aversion to chemistry, her ardent contempt for hippies (especially American hippies), and her fondness for drug use, eating disorders, and suicide.

As the story progresses, Alex begins to slowly emerge from the isolation and alienation that she feels in this bizarre American city, and begins to befriend some of the people at university, cautiously disclosing bits about herself to her cohort, but never letting them completely into her weird, private world. The reader becomes more and more aware of the dual life that she leads, being impressively stoic whilst at work, though spending most of her free time in alcohol and drug related support groups. Snapshots are given about Alex’s incredibly dysfunctional and equally patrician family that she comes from and often is not speaking to.

In this story, one is given the illustration of Alex’s perfectly absurd life both in her encounters with the ill-behaved scientists in the world of fierce and seemingly needless competition in academic chemistry, and in the tragically humourous, secret world of her dark mind in which she primarily lives.