Cosmo Girl!
columnist Iacuzzo grew up in a family of seers—including brother Frank, also a celebrity psychic—where fortune-telling, séances and prophetic visions were a daily routine. But psychological factors, including her mother's coldness and her brother's temper, loom larger than psychic phenomena in this spirited and affecting coming-of-age memoir. School was "excruciating" for young Terry, but she, like her siblings, had only to think of blood to get a nose bleed (and a hall pass); later, prescience about her classmates' cheating boyfriends earned her social cachet. Following Frank (her "real mother") to New York after high school, Iacuzzo bounced between apartments and jobs, dropped acid religiously, discovered her sexuality, steeped herself in the effervescent confluence of the blossoming gay and New Age spiritualist subcultures of the 1960s and '70s and finally settled down to offering startling psychic insights to VIP clients. There are a few too many recollected conversations from decades past and trippy descriptions of her LSD-fueled visionary trances, and skeptics may doubt her tales of bizarre paranormal happenings. But her story is full of colorful, well-observed characters, and her insights into more everyday occurrences—such as her tense, poignant account of a visit by her working-class, homophobic father to Frank's wealthy, flamboyant, gay demimonde—prove her a skilled portrayer of familial complexities and disaffection, both normal and paranormal. Agent, Candice Fuhrman
. (Jan.)
