and screen
. She is perhaps better known for sensationalized and fictional accounts of her life, and especially her involuntary commitment
to a mental hospital
. Farmer was the subject of three films, three books, and numerous songs and magazine articles.
Farmer was born in Seattle, Washington
, to Ernest Melvin Farmer and Cora Lillian (Van Ornum) Farmer. In 1931, while attending West Seattle High School
, she entered and won $100 from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a writing contest sponsored by Scholastic Magazine, with her controversial essay "God Dies".
If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.
I didn't think then, and I still don't, that I was actually sick.
There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream.
It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.
I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ (Christianity)|Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.
I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was… nothingness.