"Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann


Valley of the Dolls is a novel by American writer Jacqueline Susann, published in 1966. The "dolls" within the title is a euphemism for pills, and was created by Susann. The term represents the women's reliance on stimulants, depressants, and sleeping pills, and how substance abuse is reminiscent of children clinging to toy dolls for comfort.

An overnight success when it was first published, Valley of the Dolls became the bestselling work of fiction of 1966. Since then it has sold more than 30 million copies, making it one of the bestselling books of all time. As the first roman à clef by a female author to achieve this level of sales in America, it led the way for other authors such as Jackie Collins to depict the private lives of the real-life rich and famous under a veneer of fiction. The 1997 reissue by Grove Press calls the book "The All-Time Pop-Culture Classic" on its back cover.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Wolf Totem" by Lü Jiamin

Image
Wolf Totem is a 2004 Chinese semi-autobiographical novel about the experiences of a young student from Beijing who finds himselfsent to the countryside of Inner Mongolia in 1967, at the height of China's Cultural Revolution.   The author, Lü Jiamin, wrote the book under the pseudonym Jiang Rong; his true identity did not become publicly known until several years after the book's publication. Wolf Totem exhibited strong sales almost immediately after its release, selling 50,000 copies in two weeks.   By March 2006, it had sold over four million copies in China, and had been broadcast in audiobook format in twelve parts during prime time on China Radio International.   Jiang released a children's edition of the book in July 2005, cut down to roughly one-third the length.
Continue reading ...

"The Girl Who Fell From The Sky" by Heidi Duro

Image
Heidi W. Durrow  (born June 21, 1969) is an American writer, author of best-seller   The Girl Who Fell From the Sky , and the winner of the 2008 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction. This novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and black father. When Rachel, her mother, and her younger brother fall nine stories from an apartment building, Rachel is the only survivor, and she’s taken in by her black grandmother in a predominantly white Portland neighborhood. With her brown skin and blue eyes (a white girl’s eyes in a Black girl’s face) Rachel faces the challenge of learning what it means to be biracial in a black-and-white world. Duro offers a masterful novel that interrogates the cultural construction of race in America and challenges us to confront our own prejudices.
Continue reading ...

"Peyton Place" by Grace Metalious

Image
Peyton Place is a 1956 novel by Grace Metalious. The novel describes how three women are forced to come to terms with their identity, both as women and as sexual beings, in a small, conservative, gossipy New England town, with recurring themes of hypocrisy, social inequities and class privilege in a tale that includes incest, abortion, adultery, lust and murder. It sold 60,000 copies within the first ten days of its release and remained on the New York Times best seller list for 59 weeks. The novel spawned a franchise that would eventually run through four decades. Twentieth Century-Fox adapted it as a major motion picture in 1957, and Metalious wrote a follow-up novel that was published in 1959, called Return to Peyton Place, which was also filmed in 1961 using the same title. The original 1956 novel was adapted again in 1964, in what became a wildly successful prime time television series for20th Century Fox Television that ran until 1969, and the term "Peyton Place"
Continue reading ...