Over the course of twenty years, Anne, Neely, and Jennifer get comprehensively screwed. And there’s Jennifer North, an actress who cheerfully admits to having no talent, but whose body is her primary asset. There’s her roommate, Neely O’Hara, a seventeen-year-old who’s already been a professional performer for a decade, and who finally gets her big break through Anne’s friendship. There’s Anne Welles, a refugee from emotionally frigid New England small-town life, devastatingly beautiful and seeking an existence as an employed woman on her own terms. If you don’t know the plot already (and I didn’t, having neither previously read it nor seen the film, released in 1967 and starring Sharon Tate), it revolves around three young women in New York City just after WWII. So there’s an obvious question, one that springs immediately to mind, regarding this reprint: is Valley of the Dolls a feminist book? It’s being republished by Virago Press, the imprint well known for championing women’s writing they publish, among others, Angela Carter, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, and Margaret Atwood. Valley of the Dolls is 50 years old this year. “You’ve got to climb Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls.”
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