Category Archives: Valley of the Dolls

With Role Models Like These…

A thirteen year old’s reading list.  At the time (the early 1970s) I didn’t see anything unusual in my choice of reading.  With my mother out partying every night with a wild cast of American expats and European jetsetters, the insane drug addicted narcissists of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of Dolls, the rapacious unhappy housewife of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and the incestuous courtesans of Jean Plaidy’s Light on Lucrezia didn’t strike me as abnormal or different from the real world.  In fact, they confirmed to me that life with my mother may not have been all that unusual in the great scheme of things.  

It may be an odd worldview for a thirteen year old but it was all I had. 

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