Review
Praise for Valley of the Dolls:
The kind of book most of its readers could not put down. I, for one, could not . . . For me reading Valley of the Dolls was like reading a very, very long, absolutely delicious gossip column . . . Magnetic.”Nora Ephron
It’s the most unputdownable book.”Candace Bushnell
Valley of the Dolls is a grim fable. It’s Thomas Hardy dark. It’s Balzac bleak. It’s Dostoyevsky greige. Nothing ends well. Success corrupts. Fame destroys . . . Everyone is a mess. It is, in other words, the perfect mirror for today’s culture.”Simon Doonan, Slate
A cult classic about three girls, striving to become stars, whose dreams come trueonly to be derailed by their dependence on dolls,’ Susann’s slang for uppers and downers . . . A racy roman à clef depicting.”Holly Millea, Elle
I couldn’t believe these weren’t real girls because I know them. Maddeningly sexy. I wish I had written it.”Helen Gurley Brown
Valley of the Dolls is one of the great books of the postwar era. There’s a punchy, masculine, brazen quality to [Susann’s] writing that I identify with as a reader. The kind of language that she uses and the kind of imagination she has are totally contemporary.”Camille Paglia
Racing against time for fame, Susann knew how to give readers what they wanted: a shockingly contemporary page-turner that went deep into the stuff of taboo, but still adhered to old scripts of women suffering virtuously in their undying love of men.”Tim Murphy, Nation
Valley of the Dolls captures, perfectly, a particular time in post-war America. Susann introduces the great social changes that redefined our culture in this fun, funny, accessible, poignant pop culture masterpiece. I can’t imagine a life without VOD in it. It’s a touchstone text.”Ira Silverberg, former editor in chief of Grove Press where he began publishing Valley of the Dolls in 1997
Valley of the Dolls is truly a timeless classic . . . Today Neely O’Hara would become a YouTube sensation, Jennifer North would be an Instagram influencer, and Anne Welles would be a Snapchat queen. No matter how high-toned people want to be, there’s nothing more addictive than a juicy, scandal-filled, drama-laced soap opera!”Mickey Boardman, Paper magazine
Exciting news for all you modern Dolls (#squadgoals) and aspiring millennial readers . . . the story feels more relevant than ever.”Micaela English, Town & Country
Valley of the Dolls remains a pop-culture touchstone: a gleefully salacious story of friendship, sex, backstabbing and pills (or dolls’).”Alexandria Symonds, T: The New York Times Style Magazine
Valley of the Dolls turns fifty this yearand it still looks fabulous.”NPR’s Weekend Edition
It’s always been a bit of an inspiration to me . . . It’s a darn good read. There’s a depth to it, there’s a sadness and a reality to it that’s actually poignant.”Candace Bushnell, NPR’s Weekend Edition
Susann predicted the celebrity culture we live in now. Actually, she invented it: fame is as fame does.”Letty Cottin Pogrebin, founding editor of Ms. Magazine and publicity director for Bernard Geis hardcover launch of Valley of the Dolls
I marvel as always at the raw energy, the detail, and the grim authenticity of the book’s depiction of New York show biz society . . . I have learned from Jackie Susann. I have always respected her power . . . Jackie was among other things utterly sincere in what she wrote.”Anne Rice, New York Times bestselling author
Valley realized Jackie’s ambition to be a storyteller and the #1 bestselling novelist. She was true to the show business world she knew intimatelya nonstop promoter and entertainer. With her husband Irving Mansfield, her publishers, and teams of publicists, Jackie changed how books would be marketed for years to come.”Esther Margolis, founder and publisher of Newmarket Press, former SVP at Bantam Books, and publicity director for Bantam’s campaigns for all of Jacqueline Susann’s novels
Valley of the Dolls remains a brave, bold, angry and, yes, definitely a feminist book. All that, and still about the most fun you can have without a prescription.”Julie Burchill, Guardian (UK)
If Jacqueline Susann was not precisely the voice of the 60s,’ then she was its aching female heart.”Amy Fine Collins, Vanity Fair
Valley of the Dolls is a zipper-ripper that has been called trashy, tawdry, glitzy, lusty, sordid, and seamyand that’s just the beginning of its appeal.”Nancy Bachrach, NPR.org
Reading the book feels more like hurtling down Niagara Fallsdriven by a torrent of sex, drugs, and doom. The panic with which one turns the pages is like the mixture of curiosity and fear that accompanies reading the Oedipus myth. The protagonists can’t do anything to escape their terrible fates, and each choice binds them closer to their destinies, yet there are no other choices. Just as in the myth, where things cannot turn out well for humans, in Valley of the Dolls nothing can turn out well for women past thirty.”Sheila Heti, Bookforum
A generation that knows Sex and the City, and which connects to Lena Dunham’s Girls, may not instantly connect the dots to Susann, who did it all first, and in Pucci. A culture that cavalierly tosses off the term chick lit’ doesn’t fully realize how fast Susann was out of the gate so many decades ago in the way she gave frank talk to women.”Shinan Govani, Globe and Mail (Toronto)
As an adolescent I borrowed’ a copy from my mother’s bedside basket of books without telling her. The Pepto Bismolpink cover was irresistible to me, and the novel rewarded my curiosity . . . a salacious read I’ve revisited several times in adulthood.”Laura June, New York magazine’s The Cut
Jackie, it seemed, understood by instinct that her readers were ready for the raw side of love . . . for a franker sexuality and a tougher kind of storyfor romance with tears and oral sex.”Michael Korda, former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and editor of The Love Machine, in the New Yorker
Bust out your best Pucci and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the classic guilty pleasure that scandalized a nation, appalled the stodgy critical community, and apparently presaged our national addiction to opiates.”O Magazine
Susann’s lurid descriptions of three pill-popping young women struggling with fame and beautybased off her own lifewere vivid and relevant enough to a generation of women clamoring for stories about themselves.”Kate Dries, Jezebel
Jacqueline Susann’s questioning of glamour and fame, so unsettling in its honesty, crept into my head and stayed there, lingering for years until I was finally able to give it my own expression.”Lori Goldstein
Valley of the Dolls is fascinating. It pushed the genre of fictionalized show business into a new realm of realism . . . Susann set her story in post-World War II America, offering a devastating peek behind the crumbling facade of female stardom in a male-dominant world. Valley acknowledged the existence of sex in a way no other book previously had . . . It was the 50 Shades of Grey of its time, and it was received with the same mixture of wild fandom and critical derision.”—Lauren Smart, Dallas Morning News
[Susann] was crass and she was brave. She was giving women permission to be something other than what they had been told they had to be.”Marissa Stapley, Toronto Star (Canada)
Decades ahead of its time . . . Mesmerizing . . . The equation of emotional dependencies with drug addiction in one comprehensive personality disorder is, if anything, more chic today than in Susann’s time.”Mim Udovitch, Village Voice Literary Supplement
Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls is still my favourite bonkbuster. What strikes me is this 60s bestseller’s essential sincerity, whether in the matter of abortion, adultery or mental illness.”Rachel Cooke, Guardian (UK)
[A] famous cult hit.”Vanity Fair
The iconic novel that shook the 60s to its core with its shocking look into the lives of three friends who fall into the seedy underworld of fame and drug addiction.”People
A bonafide, ahead-of-its-time American classic.”BookPage
One of the sexiest novels ever written.”Earl Wilson
About the Author
Jacqueline Susann is a legend in American publishing. Her debut novel, Valley of the Dolls, published in 1966, has sold over 31 million copies in thirty languages. Susann was the first author to have three consecutive #1 books on the New York Times bestseller list. She was married to her beloved husband, producer Irving Mansfield, until her untimely death on September 21, 1974, after a courageously fought battle with breast cancer. Susann’s intensely private twelve-year fight to overcome the disease was not known publicly until after her death. She was fifty-six.
