“The signed marriage paper [reproduced in Strange Days] isn't the only piece of documentation I have. There are letters and poems from Jim in which he refers to me as Mrs. James Morrison, his wife and other such titles—in his own handwriting—things his own family has seen.

“So yes, I think I do have grounds to consider myself Jim's spouse, and anyone who says otherwise can go to hell. Jim said I was his wife, and that's more than enough for me. And he should know who his wife is. Plus, how disrespectful is that kind of attitude of Jim himself? I’m the Yoko Ono of the Doors, and I’m very weary of being treated that way when all I have ever done for Jim has been out of love.

“On the other hand, it’s also rather telling that neither the Morrison family nor the Courson family, in the almost 18 years since Strange Days appeared or the almost 30 years since No One Here Gets Out Alive (which said publicly in print, for the first time, and I quote, ‘Jim and Patricia were married’), ever made any attempt to prevent me from using the words wife, marriage or the name Morrison, which I have used privately ever since June 24, 1970 and assumed legally in 1979, after I left the music business.

“If they didn't in all this time seek to stop me, I have to assume they just don't care...or, perhaps,  their legal advisors were aware of the case law and didn't want the hassle of another court fight, which, based on New York State law at least, they might very well lose. I’ve never been in it for the money and I never accepted a cent from Jim, except once in a situation that was his rightful responsibility, so that’s not even an issue for me.

“Maybe they figure it’s easier and more effective to discredit me by ridicule. Well, for my husband and myself, I can take it. This is the most I’ve ever said publicly about this. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

Bringing the conversation back to her book, Patricia went on to say that intelligent readers got what she had to say and saw through the ‘romanticization’ of Morrison’s relationship with Pamela Courson.  A relationship “that, in the end, had become little more than a comfortable, non-sexual (they both told me so) relationship between two addicts and mutual enablers. Jim’s and my relationship was one of a young man and a younger woman who had a great romantic, intellectual and sexual partnership. And people—the right people—recognize this.

“Listen, I’ve never denied the importance of others in Jim’s life—and I’ve certainly never denied Pam’s importance— yet people, many of whom weren’t even alive then, deny my importance in his life all the time. Others in Jim’s life, and many who never even knew him, make a big deal of how much they loved him, yet they write endless books or plays or movies that profit off him; they even sell his possessions for money, which I would sooner starve in the gutter than do.

“Yet when I speak of how desperately much I love him, of how I’ve stayed stainlessly faithful to him for forty years and will to the end of my days, of my unending grief and loss, somehow that doesn’t count, and my writing ONE book, as opposed to their Morrison cottage industry, the only book that really shows him the way he was and has insights nobody else can match, somehow I’m Satan’s concubine for doing that. How is it okay for them to endlessly make money off Jim, but not okay for me to have written a single book about him—a book which was also about me and which, though it sold well, has hardly made me a wealthy woman? Well, that’s hideously cruel, hypocritical and unfair, and Jim would be the first person to say so.

“He was quoted as having once told Danny Sugerman that if his, Jim’s, name could ever buy Danny a cup of coffee, Danny shouldn’t hesitate to use it. And as we all know, Danny never hesitated for a heartbeat to capitalize on Jim. How is that more honorable than what I’ve done for Jim, at great personal cost to us both, with Strange Days? I’ve kept the faith better, and done better by Jim, and more lovingly, than just about all of them.”

Writers often wish that they had said, or not said, something in their work.  I asked Kennealy-Morrison if there was anything she wrote in Days that she wished later that she hadn’t.

“Nope. It all had to be there. If the bad stuff wasn’t there, nobody would believe the good stuff. And there’s a lot of good stuff that people really should be believing, stuff they’re not getting anywhere else. If I didn’t include it all, I’d be as bad as Oliver Stone. Worse, because I know better. Anyway, it’s my story as well as Jim’s, half of it mine and half of it his, and I have every right to write about it.”