John Lurie - Personal Life

Personal Life

In New York City, he has lived with a girlfriend but has not married. The artist Jean-Michel Basquiat slept on Lurie's apartment floor for a few days at a time, on and off over a couple of years, leaving studies and artwork behind. In cleaning his apartment, Lurie says he may have thrown away "millions of dollars worth" of art.

In interviews, Lurie says he has experienced debilitating ill health since 2000, with initially baffling neurological symptoms. At one point, he was told he had a year to live. The doctors he consulted in the first few years did not agree on a diagnosis, but by 2006 eight doctors each said it was late persistent Lyme disease, a chronic malady. Lurie names 1994 as the time of his first exposure to Lyme disease. The illness has kept him from acting or performing music, and Lurie spends his energy painting.

In August 2010, Tad Friend wrote a piece in The New Yorker about Lurie disappearing from New York, hiding from an artist named John Perry, whom Friend said was stalking Lurie. Perry and Lurie had a falling out over an incomplete documentary film shoot, a pilot project of Perry's called The Drawing Show. Lurie described the article as "wildly inaccurate", noting in February 2011 that its publication did not resolve anything, that "the situation continues". In May 2011, Perry undertook a public hunger strike to protest The New Yorker characterizing him as a stalker. Editor David Remnick said the piece in his magazine was "thoroughly reported and fact-checked" and that Perry was accurately portrayed. Lurie commented sarcastically about the protest: "He's conducting a hunger strike a half block from my house to prove he's not a stalker". Author Rick Moody wrote in the online literary magazine The Rumpus that Friend's profile in The New Yorker, nominally about Lurie and his art, was two-thirds to three-quarters about Perry, including a full page photo of Perry standing in front of one of his own paintings. The article did not feature images of Lurie's art. Moody confirmed that Lurie was very ill with chronic Lyme disease, and he described Perry as a deceitful stalker, capable of violence.