Peggy Caserta, whose candid revelations about her romantic relationship with rock star Janis Joplin were revealed in a groundbreaking if often sordid 1973 tell-all book that she later disavowed as ghostwritten exploitation, died Thursday, November 21, of natural causes at her cabin on the Tillamook River on the Oregon Coast. She was 84.

Her death was announced to Deadline by Nancy Cleary, her friend and the publisher at Wyatt-MacKenzie, the publishing house that in 2018 released I Ran Into Some Trouble, Caserta’s second book of memoirs that revisited much of the events of the first, Going Down With Janis, as well as chronicled the author’s tumultuous life in the decades after Joplin’s 1970 death.

Her first memoir, written she later said for the sole purpose of funding the ferocious heroin habit that would dog her for decades, has over the years been both reviled as a tawdry invasion of privacy and revered...