And for a time, I was convinced he did it, although I could never find evidence. I forget where exactly, I seem to recall from essays written when he was living in London in the 1970s? Anyway, for a while, I was keen on the question of whether he murdered her. The killing of Vollmer is a particularly ugly fact given that a misogynist streak is evident in some of Burroughs’ early writing. It is only in those highly-fictionalized films that I have gained any slight sense of who Joan Vollmer might have been. The relationship and tragic shooting has been dramatized in at least two films: “Naked Lunch” (Vollmer portrayed by Judy Davis), and “Beat” (Vollmer portrayed by Courtney Love). I have gotten no sense of Joan Vollmer at all from his writing, and I have looked. He addressed the incident in the introduction to Queer (the book he wrote while awaiting trial), and he basically only says how it affected him personally. He famously shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken “William Tell act” at a party in Mexico City in 1951.
He has written about being a junkie and robbing passed-out drunks for fix money. For long stretches of his life, he associated with criminals and the seediest countercultures of hard drugs. He suffered sexual abuse as a child from a caregiver. He died in Lawrence, Kansas in 1997.īurroughs is a deeply problematic and divisive moral figure. Television / Radio / Streaming / Social Media.
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