Cassandra is the person behind the persona. Peterson is very clear in the way she differentiates Elvira and Cassandra as two separate entities. Theirs was a complicated and often tumultuous relationship, and Peterson said she couldn't have written the book while her mother was still alive. During our chat, there was admittedly one person she didn't want to read this book - her mother. Instead, she chooses to name names, voices support for the Me Too movement, and calls upon the men in the audience to stand up. The raw honesty is something to be admired it never feels like Peterson pulls back when it would have been a hell of a lot easier to. But it's all here, unfolding as a stranger-than-fiction life led by not just a horror idol but a bonafide pop-culture icon.

The potential headlines are bountiful: 'Elvira Is a Witch!' 'Elvira Was Kidnapped in Italy and Escaped to Tell the Tale! 'Elvira Learned to Twirl Nipple Tassels at the Tender Age of Way Too Young!' The fact that all of these years are compiled into the life of one single human is hardly comprehendible.

Was it the headline of an entire book based upon an incredibly fascinating life? Eh.īefore becoming Elvira, Peterson was a teenage Las Vegas showgirl, lived in an actual literal treehouse, had an encounter with a potentially eternal immortal pigeon, and these aren't even the juiciest bits! In all honesty, you could pull any span of three to five years from these pages and have a movie rife with exciting tidbits. Towards the end of the book, as the pages catch up to the contemporary life of Cassandra, she shares with readers that she has been in a long-term relationship with her partner T, who is a woman, for the last nineteen years. Peterson covers a lifetime of movie-worthy events in the chapters before Elvira ever comes into play a fascinating, rich, wild, adventurous life. I don't know, strange somehow? Coupled with the fact that suddenly pictures of Peterson and her partner T were making the rounds, it all felt somehow beside the point. And while the choice to share the personal information with Elvira fans that she has been in a nearly two-decade relationship with a woman did mean something major to many of us, the fact that it was the headline plastered everywhere felt. Much of the press surrounding Cassandra Peterson's new memoir, Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark went heavy on the headlines of a certain revelation Peterson made within the pages.

Memoirs of the mistress of the dark