Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Edie: American Girl
Book Review: Edie in the Round
Summary: 5 Stars
A truely original way to write a biography. The author interviewed many of the people who knew Edie. I watched Caio Manhattan at the same time. The book really helped explain what was going on behind the scenes in the movie. The best thing about this book is the photographs. I read "In My Blood" by John Sedgwick, Edie's cousin, at the same time and found myself going back and forth from his narratives to look at the photographs in Edie. They make good companion volumes.Book Review: Edie: An Utterly Vapid and Useless Failure
Summary: 1 Stars
I picked up this book in an attempt to understand the myth of this woman; to see if there was any real depth to the story. Unfortunately, there is none.
Born of a clinical narcissist and his shell of a wife, Edie was raised in a hermetically sealed environment of mental disease. Narcissists are soul destroyers of the first order. Children raised in close proximity to a narcissist and his slave (wife) do not develop full human personalities. Sometimes the damage is so severe, the child becomes a narcissist themselves. If the damage is not complete, they grow into incomplete people unable to function. Some survivors work hard and are able to create some sort of life for themselves, others can't or won't. Eddie was part of the latter group.
Edie's story is absent of almost everything that makes life worth living: love, friendship, accomplishment. After leaving her parents world, she was on a continual quest for alcohol, drugs, and attention.
Edie is such a dismal subject, the author devotes about 1/2 the book things and people not Edie. I think if they had confined the stories just to Edie, the book would have been completely miserable and very repetitive. The non-Edie parts are interesting, but I bought this book because it was called "Edie" and so that's what I am reviewing, i.e. the parts about Edie. Here is nutshell summery of what the book tells us about Edie: 1) Edie was beautiful. 2) Edie liked attention. 3) Edie was always getting wasted. 4) Edie spent a lot of other people's money. 5) Edie was in and out of mental hospitals. 6) Edie made no effort to grow, or create a real life for herself. 7) Edie died a drug addict with a bad boob job.
In short, the book is about an empty shell of a woman with no redeeming qualities except for her looks. Actually, she had one redeeming quality, she never bore any children.
Another thing about this book that bugged me was the way the interviewees for the most part tried to paint their scene in the 60's as something worthwhile. As if getting addicted to speed and engaging in anonymous orgies and having friends die/end up in jail was somehow a better way of living. Or that people who didn't have those experiences missed out on something special. From my perspective, most of these characters look to have be pathetic and dismal.
Book Review: Edie:An American Review
Summary: 5 Stars
Although this book is over twenty years old, it is still a good source of info about this "Girl of 1965", Edie Sedgwick. Not only does the book document the rise of Edie at Andy Warhol's Factory, it chronicles her wacky childhood of privledge and turbulent teen years. Her sisters and only surviving brother give detailed accounts of Edie and her struggle with eating disorders and frequent hospitalizations. The family also talks about the abuse they suffered at the hands of their father, Francis Sedgwick, and the effect it had on the entire family. "Edie" is a great read on a life of a woman whose life ended long ago in a time that seems unreal to most young people of today. "Edie" not only documents a time in pop history ,but a life which was lived tragically wrong and gave out all too soon.Book Review: Extra-ordinary biography of a tragic figure
Summary: 4 Stars
Maybe I don't get out enough, but I have never read a biography like this one. Masterfully composed from hundreds of interviews with family and friends of Edie Sedgewick, the book paints a remarkably detailed, three dimensional picture of this charismatic and tragic child of the American aristocracy. The writing and editing are brilliant.
The chapters dedicated to family and interviews with family members are by far the most compelling. They describe the history, beginning in the 1700s, of a privileged aristocratic family and a generation that came to maturity in the 50s and 60s that descended into madness and self-destruction as a result of the cruelty and narcissism of their father and a genetic predisposition helped along by drugs and alcohol.
The chapters covering Edie's celebrity years in New York with Warhol, the Factory and the various hangers on that followed are boring and pathetic. While she was beautiful and charismatic, Edie at this stage had become a junkie and all junkie stories are pathetic and boring no matter how wonderful the true underlying personality is. Most of the interview quotes from this crowd are likewise boring and pathetic because they were drug-addled at the same time that Edie was and, frankly, these people just don't seem very thoughtful or articulate.
Edie's death from a drug overdose had a morbid inevitability about it and one can't help but feel a deep sadness that such a charismatic human being was destroyed by something so cheap and sordid as narcotics and the legions of so-called friends that egged her on. What's even more tragic to contemplate is the thousands of other young people, privileged and not, who met the same fate because drugs became glamorized during the 60s.
I picked this book up on a lark, having watched the movie "Factory Girl" and wanting to better understand this era. My expectations were low. However, once I started I couldn't put the book down. It's a brilliant and unique biography and well worth a read, though you may not enjoy the people who populate it.
Book Review: Faery Child
Summary: 5 Stars
The oral history form is perfect for "Edie" little-girl-lost, who streaked across the '60's horizon like a falling star. Despite her grace, fragile beauty and charisma; Edie Sedgewick was almost born to be doomed even before the drugs did her in.She was born into a wealthy old family that had a history of instability. Her father, also breathtakingly beautiful, had crushing psychological problems. Two of her brothers committed suicide. Her mother was ineffectual with her large brood. She was raised on an isolated ranch with her seven siblings with almost no contact with the outside world. When she hit Cambridge at 18, she was pathetically ill equipped to be in the larger world.
I couldn't agree more that she found herself in the midst of horribly decadent people. Andy Warhol gets a particularly bad rap in this book, but to me, he was no better nor worse than his hangers-on, just a shade more self-absorbed. What really saddened me was that I don't think it really mattered who Edie took up with. She was destined to spin out of control. She had no focus, no inner strength, and was dangerously self-centered and delusionary.
"Edie" is compelling reading whether or not you have experienced the '60's. It is good to keep in mind that Edie herself and the contributors to the book all were a part of a very small stratum that whistled through this confusing decade. They were no more representative of the rank and file than Emmerin is representative of this decade.
Such a lovely child, such a terrible waste.