Author of the week: Heather Donahue

last updated 8 January 2015

You might recognize Heather Donahue—if you saw her crying, said Tad Friend in The New Yorker. Twelve years ago, Donahue starred in The Blair Witch Project, the low-budget horror film that became a huge smash in part because some viewers believed it was made from actual documentary footage. “That role will forever define me; it’s like I got a tattoo on my face,” says Donahue, now 38. Even former high school classmates, she reports, weren’t sure she hadn’t been killed. There were other reasons she fell off the radar, though. Donahue’s funny new memoir, Growgirl, recounts how she eventually quit Hollywood and became a “pot wife,” growing medicinal marijuana with a boyfriend in a Northern California community nicknamed Nuggettown. The pot wife, she writes “is like a Beverly Hills trophy wife with more body hair….Frequently, she is a semiretired massage therapist.”

Donahue’s ganja-growing stint was no pastoral idyll, said Marlow Stern in TheDailyâ€‹Beast.com. Operating in a legal gray area eventually wore on her. “The paranoia really took a toll, and I wanted to do something I could tell my parents about,” she says. Nuggettown, with its throwback hippie lifestyle, was also surprisingly paternalistic. Still, she wishes the best for her former friends should marijuana legalization go national. “Right now, it’s the only multibillion-dollar industry whose wealth is distributed at the mom-and-pop level,” she says. “I’d hate to see [those people] end up being sharecroppers for the big agro companies.”