I met Karen Moller in January at her house overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. It was a glorious January afternoon and we stood standing in the windows admiring one of the most marvelous cities in the world, as little canal boats rocked in the spirited waters below. We sipped prosecco and talked about the book she was writing, Technicolor Dreamin’. Then the stories started about her creative romp through the go-go ‘60s in London and the subsequent creative explosions in Paris. And they went on throughout the afternoon.

Over the course of three decades it seems Karen met pretty much every hip personality that defined the times – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman and the beatnik brotherhood at City Lights in San Francisco – Larry Rivers, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky. She became friends with Ab Ex icon Franz Kline at the Cedar Tavern in New York. And perhaps most importantly, in Paris, where she was to eventually set up her fashion consulting and design business, Trend Union, Karen connected with the Beats at the Place de la Contrescarpe. She hooked up with Robin Page and Peter Golding at The Beat Hotel (below). She followed through on her art studies, studying with André Lhote, until she began taking part in the art activities of Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri and Robert Filliou. She met John Cage and Andy Warhol – as well as writers Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Joe Jones and J.P. Donleavy – who checked in to Paris on their “remaking the world tour.”

Technicolor Dreamin’ (330 pages, in English, Trafford Publishing) just came out in London and is now in bookstores in Paris at Shakespeare & Company or The Village Voice Bookshop . It’s the sort of memoir you breeze through – a very fresh first-person gallop through more than 30 summers of the Summer of Love, there’s plenty of insider hanging out (meeting Burroughs in a dark hallway) and anecdotes with artists like Yves Klein painting women blue. “I was one of Klein’s backup brush girls.”

Karen Moller grew up in a small town (population 450) in the mountains of Western Canada. She took off at 19, hitchhiking with a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road under her arm, after graduating from art school in Calgary and soon found herself in the Swinging London of the ’60s, where she became one of those Carnaby Street regulars where you wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen her on the set of Medium Cool. Karen seemed to live it all – but was no mere observer: she started her own little boutique on a shoestring and even had Twiggy model her clothes. Karen soon established the first textile design studio in London with her prints (her true passion) and sold them worldwide. (She’s since moved Trend Union to Paris). But the artist in training lived out the hottest moments in 60s, among them, working behind the barricades in Paris in May 1968. She fondly remembers the French being “so un-French” at the time, asking not what it was going to cost them, but “what will this do to the minds and spirits of our children?”

Karen now splits her time between her townhouse in Paris and the large apartment in Venice, which she shares with artist Alain Arias-Misson, who figures prominently as the “dashing true love of her life.” Karen met Alain in a little motorboat in the middle of a busy canal in Venice (and almost fell overboard – or she nearly tossed him overboard, it’s not clear). Alain, unsurprisingly, is now writing a book of fiction to be published with the Dalkey Archive – “a very scandalous autobiography” entitled Theater of Incest. It promises to be an equally entertaining trip.