Susan Gordon Lydon (November 14, 1943July 15, 2005) was an American journalist and writer, known for her 1970 feminist essay "The Politics of Orgasm", which brought the female fake orgasm into popular discussion. She helped start Rolling Stone magazine and covered music journalism for it, and also wrote pieces for Ramparts, Ms. and The New York Times Magazine. She started a newspaper for the Arica School in the 1970s. She was a columnist for the Oakland Tribune newspaper, and she wrote two books about knitting. In 1993 she published a memoir, Take The Long Way Home: Memoirs Of A Survivor, detailing her career highs and drug-addicted lows, ending in a successful recovery. Her memoir came one year after the book Home Fires, written by Don Katz about her birth family, the Gordons. Early life Lydon was born to an American Jewish family in The Bronx. Her father was electrician Sam Goldenberg, and her mother was Eve Samberg, a singer at resorts in the Catskills Mountains; they married in 1942. Sam left to serve in the U.S. Army in Europe in 1943, and Lydon was born in November while he was away. She was named by her mother for actress Susan Hayward. After her father returned in 1945, the family welcomed two more daughters, Lorraine (1946) and Sheila (1949). In 1952, they all moved to Island Park on Long Island, to live in the newly built suburbs, and they changed their surname to Gordon. Son Ricky was born in 1956; post-partum woes added to the bouts of depression that had come over Eve in 1955. In 1961 at age 17, Lydon was sneaking out of the house to nightclubs, and smoking marijuana. Despite these peccadillos, she earned a full scholarship and entered Vassar College in September 1961 to study history. At Vassar, she started taking diet pills containing amphetamine, and continued to smoke marijuana. She met Michael Lydon, a student at Yale University. In 1965 she graduated from college and married Michael. Journalism Michael and Susan Lydon moved to the UK to work in journalism. He wrote about British affairs for the American magazine Newsweek. As a freelancer, she submitted fashion pieces for London Life magazine, the newly adopted name of the Tatler, published weekly during the Swinging Sixties. She also wrote for The Times. The two left London for San Francisco at the beginning of 1967, just in time to