Joyce started to show signs of mental illness in 1930, a year after she began casually dating the twenty-three year old Samuel Beckett, then a junior lecturer in English at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris.
By 1934 she had participated in several failed affairs, with her drawing teacher Alexander Calder, another expatriate artist Albert Hubbell, and Myrsine Moschos, assistant to Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company.