Joan Foster is a woman with numerous identities and a talent for shedding them at will. She has written trashy gothic romances, had affairs with a Polish count and an absurd avant-garde artist, and played at being a politically engaged partner to her activist husband. After a volume of her poetry becomes an unexpected literary sensation, her new fame attracts a blackmailer threatening to reveal her secrets. Joan's response is to fake her own death and flee to a hill town in Italy. But what at first seems to be just another attempt to escape herself becomes instead an occasion for confronting the self-deception that has driven her since childhood. Studded with hair-raising comic escapades and piercing psychological insights, Lady Oracle is both hilarious and profound.