"Giving testimony, perhaps that is all my life is now," Lovelace once said.

Lovelace's own books never won much critical acclaim, but she remained a cultural icon. In her latter-day incarnation as an antiporn feminist, flanked by the likes of Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, she often said that she wanted more than anything to be remembered as the victim of "Deep Throat" rather than its star. In every profile of her from the '70s and '80s a sort of relentless doe-eyed innocence bizarrely emerges.

She was never proud of her role as a revolutionary. Her ghostwriter recalls her distaste at the loose society around her. "It's everywhere you turn around," she once said. "This one's wife is going out with that one's husband . . . I don't know why something like that happens but I feel sorry for them. Oh, there are so many unhappy people. I just don't understand America."

"Deep Throat" didn't kill her naiveté--only ours.