You say nothing good came of the first book, but certainly it was a landmark for its depiction of Janis’s gay relationship. I felt grounded, and knew I should start writing again. I began to write a little, and I had written maybe two or three chapters when I decided that I needed to go back home and take care of my mom in Louisiana. Years later, I had gotten clean and started trying to live straight. But I stayed strung out, and it’s very difficult to be that far off into the spoon and get anything done. I have to write the story I wanted to write.

I write, “After years of insults, along comes a Karen Anderson and acknowledges, in a public forum, what was my voice and what wasn’t, giving me a chance to exhale and try again.”įor years I thought, I have to write a correction. In the back of the new book, there’s an acknowledgment to a girl named Karen Anderson, who wrote a customer review on Amazon. What made you decide to tell your story again, then? So I just stayed hidden for, God, 25 years or more because I just couldn’t take the criticism. I wasn’t responsible for her using or her dying.” I loved her. I sometimes just wanted so badly to scream out and say, “I didn’t write that trash. I read an article online just recently and it mentioned me as “Janis Joplin’s friend.” Somebody responded, “The skank that wrote Going Down With Janis is no friend of hers.” That hurts a lot. What I hate about who they think I am is that most of them believe I wrote that smut. I was so horrified by it and my parents were … oh, God, they were heartbroken. I’m not going to make excuses for using, because a drug addict really needs no excuse, but every time that I thought I could get clean or tried to get clean, I would think about that book, and all I’d want to do is numb out again. I was so embarrassed that I just dropped out. I sold out for drug money, and I’ve lived in the shadow of it for 40-some-odd years. You say people still track you down, but if they know you only from that first book, they’re in for a revelation. Going Down With Janis has, over the decades, become a sort of cult phenomenon. (Caserta has disowned the work of Dan Knapp, her ghostwriter, on that earlier book, and in our interview she wouldn’t speak his name asked for comment, he responded with a two-word Facebook message: “Not interested.”) Co-written with Maggie Falcon, I Ran Into Some Trouble considers the whole of Caserta’s life, each era as carefully considered and vividly drawn as the headiest days of Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Mnasidika, Caserta’s Haight-Ashbury hippie boutique that dressed the new rock stars and brought the money its owner would need to keep pace, in so many ways, with a newly famous sometime lover. In between, there was drug-dealing, financial ruin, jail, harrowing street violence, and finally more than a decade spent caring for her failing mother - all of it chronicled in her memoir in a wry, funny voice that couldn’t stand in sharper contrast to the Penthouse Forum approach of Going Down With Janis. Forty-five years after the publication of her book Going Down With Janis (“A Raw and Scathing Portrait of Janis Joplin by Her Female Lover” proclaimed the hardcover jacket), the 77-year-old Caserta still gets the occasional “Are you THAT Peggy Caserta?” She is, although she lives a very different life now: semi-retired in Louisiana, 24 years sober after a long on-and-off relationship with heroin. If you know your Joplin lore, the name - Peggy Caserta, not Ruby, which never took hold - should sound familiar.

We laughed and laughed that morning, two young, silly, southern girls …” We’re sitting there, and Janis is reading the New York Times, and all of a sudden she just busted up and screamed, ‘You won’t believe this!’ There was an ad in the paper that went, ‘Ruby said to Pearl, Pearl, why don’t you be a stenographer?’ Not only did it have both of our new names, but Janis’s parents had wanted her to be a stenographer. “Still stoned, she wanted a hot-fudge chocolate sundae, junkie food, so we went to Serendipity for breakfast. “One morning, we got up at the Chelsea after a night of debauching,” Caserta tells me. “I never liked the name Peggy, and wanted to be more floozy, you know? Somewhere along the line, Janis started talking about changing her name to Pearl. “I’d wanted to start calling myself Ruby,” says Caserta, whose second memoir, I Ran Into Some Trouble, was published yesterday by Wyatt-MacKenzie. Peggy Caserta remembers the moment when Janis Joplin became Pearl. Photo: Herb Greene/Courtesy of Peggy Caserta Peggy Caserta at Mnasidika, her shop in Haight-Ashbury, with in-store leathersmith Bobby Boles.

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