Nancy, a young woman from upstate New York, comes to the city in the 6o's to work at a publishing house. After a few unproductive interviews, she lands a secretarial job at a small publisher but pushes to be on the editorial staff. What she soon finds out is that men dominate publishing and don't respect women writers, even though the greatest proportion of sales comes from women readers.
Sometime actress and television personality, Jacqueline Susann, lives with her producer/lawyer husband in a residential hotel in NYC, knowing that with her history of cancer, she was living on borrowed time. Her husband made a good living but she wanted to make her new modern sex-driven novels turn into bestsellers before she died, so she could assure herself that her autistic son would have the best care for the rest of his life.
A young mother, sister of actress Joan Collins, was trapped in a marriage with her bi-polar husband. When he almost hits her with an empty liquor bottle, she realizes that she must take their daughter and run for safety. Jackie Collins vows to become an author in the style of Jacqueline Susann and be able to safely provide for her family, in case her second husband's investments fall through.
Paul weaves these stories into a tale of how women could support each other in times of trouble. Though Nancy is a construct of all working women wanting to make their mark on the book trade, Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins were real-life trailblazers whose books shook up the ideal of cozy romances, in favor of women with ambitions of power and equal treatment-even when it came to sexual pleasure. In the age when women never went on book tours or had multiple novels on the bestseller list, Ms. Susann broke barriers by doing both. Though male critics and feminists berated Susann and Collins, their books put the focus on the changing style of women's literature, and fueled the Women's Movement.
I was very familiar with Jacqueline Susann's first book, Every Night Josephine, which was her 60's autobiography featuring her poodle. At the time I was too young to read her sensational Valley of the Dolls, and probably wouldn't have liked it because it novelized the desperate lives of actresses and celebrities, but had no poodles. Nevertheless, all women of a certain age were buying and discussing it, and it turned the publishing industry upside down. The author does a very good job of recreating this era of change and highlighting some of the pioneers who made it happen.
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