The caricatured question of second-wave feminism was “Are all men rapists?” This was the idea used to deflate and ridicule it, the conflation of a bid for equality with an unshakable animus to men. It was almost because of the lack of nuance and detail, because of the way Jacqueline Susann’s obsessions, trials, anxieties, and, above all, I think, anger, spring so unmediated on to the page, that the book gathered the momentum it did, and still has today. It would be a stretch to call it a work of feminism – a central motivating force in the lives of all three protagonists is finding a man who can support them in high style – and yet it distilled some essence of the female experience to remarkable potency.

Sure, Jackie Collins was writing nearly two decades later, having arguably had the way cleared for her by Valley, but the granular physicality, the microscopic menace, is simply and in every way superior.Īnd yet, it is immediately obvious what made Valley of the Dolls the success it was, what lassoed 30 million readers. When she woke, it was over” – with the termination scene in Hollywood Wives. Compare Jennifer’s abortion – “the nurse jabbed her arm with a needle – sodium pentothal, it was called, and it was a greater sensation than even Seconals. The scene-setting – particularly all the gory details, the sex, the drugs – is extremely sketchy. How could she have fallen for him in the first place? And if he has passed through life as an effortless heart-winner, why would that have been such an untenable legacy for an unborn child? It makes literally no sense. The plot is just preposterous: Jennifer, the talentless showgirl, falls in love with Tony Polar without noticing that he has a mental age of 12, which she discovers via his malicious half-sister, and without demur aborts the foetus that five minutes before she had invested with all her hopes for future intimacy.

Anne leaves Lawrenceville to escape her petty, judgmental mother, and yet their dialogue – “Did you ever kiss any other boy?” … “Oh, a few years back, when Willie and I first started dating, we’d play Spin the Bottle” – is trusting and open, as if between two friends, with no trace of the secrecy and resentment that such a harsh and punitive mother-daughter dyad would create. The characterisation is flaky, and the relationships two-dimensional. It covers the fortunes and friendship, but mainly the drug addiction, of three women: the prim but outrageously beautiful Anne Welles the Judy Garland-inspired vaudeville star Neely O’Hara and the busty airhead Jennifer North. First published in 1966, it has a status in the Virago canon that means many of us will have read it young, as a necessary classic, in that interim phase as a reader where you consume books like air, not stopping to interrogate their quality. T he first thing you notice, rereading Valley of the Dolls is how badly it functions as fiction.

Valley of the dolls novel