Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Edie: American Girl
Book Review: She aches like a woman but breaks just like a little girl...
Summary: 5 Stars
Edie Sedgwick. Her name is synonymous with the 60s, Andy Warhol, glamour and the epitome of having it all and not knowing what to do with it. Edie was born into a well-to-do family that traces their roots back to the Mayflower. With all her family's gifts and trappings also came great mental issues and dysfunction. The book is told from the perspective of many friends and family members who knew the family and witnessed many of the horrors that made up the Sedgwicks. Edie's problems began way before she entered the Factory or the drug scene. Her father abused her and her siblings both mentally and physically (possibly sexually), cloistered the entire clan on a sprawling ranch in California, and shut out any influence of the outside world. Before Edie was 20, two of her three brothers committed suicide and she herself was hospitalized for anorexia. After her first hospitaliztion (many more would come to follow), she enrolled at prestigious Harvard to roam around under the guise of studying sculpting before dropping out and heading to New York to model. It didn't take long for Edie to hook up with the "in crowd" in New York and soon she began making movies with Andy Warhol's Factory and becoming one of the first Superstars. Edie's fashion sense and way of life became the counter culture of the 1960s. Like any 60s heroine (no pun intended), she also got caught up in the drug scene. Ultimately, her drug use and erratic behavior signaled the beginning of the end with her and Warhol. After burning up New York (literally), she high-tailed it back to California to try to salvage her life. She desperately hung on the her glory days, making sure every person she met knew she was "somebody". Edie's story ends predictably. Too much too soon and/or gluttony at its' best. This bio, though interesting, skips around aspects of Edie's life and leaves the reader wondering how she got to certain points. Presented as a oral biography, a number of Edie's friends and family recall memories of her that are funny, sad, and compelling. Some aspects of the book could have been left out (ie Tales of her biker friends towards the end of her life that have little to do with Edie). Black and white photos of Edie spanning her lifetime are spread throughout the book, along with a few newspaper articles about her. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Warhol's Factory or want to know more about the Poor Little Rich Girl. Though some questions about Edie may never be answered, this book is a cautionary tale of a life wasted and a girl who could not control herself despite having everything in life that is suppose to make one happy.Book Review: Spellbound
Summary: 5 Stars
Fantastic book. Told from a quirky angle, but is able to get opinions pinned down. Shows a neat look into the life of Edie and has some great side plots and stories.Book Review: Stein shows us the brutal truth of American life.
Summary: 5 Stars
The story of Edie Sedgwick is a refreshing eye-opener of the reality that, to the outside world, the ideal American family is not so ideal on the inside. With well-written honesty, Stein guides us through a life that was inspiring, fast-paced, short-lived and yet too amazing to be forgotten thirty years later. Stein brings to us a sense of how we want to see, or do see a piece of ourselves in Edie. A work of art in sea of confusion and change, we now know why she is remembered as an icon rather that an addict.Book Review: Subject Unworthy of the Approach
Summary: 3 Stars
I love oral biographies (and highly recommend, by the way, SAVAGE GRACE and THE TRUE GEN), and EDIE certainly held my attention. But why? Because Edie Sedgwick was such an interesting personality? Hardly. She was a dime-a-dozen degenerate and, of course, a bore. The same is true of all her godawful cronies, including the insufferably peculiar and talentless Andy Warhol. Oral biographies, however -- regardless of the subject matter -- are always riveting. The approach reminds us that we all have memories worth remembering and stories worth telling.Book Review: The 60's " with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls".
Summary: 5 Stars
This amazing book shows some of the less constructive aspects of Andy Warhol's at times manipulative pop guises. However, it gives us a glimpse of an American woman struggling to come to grips with the "melting" of traditional gender and class roles. Rather than being a case story in the damage that drugs cause, Edie Sedgewick's life seems to be a very vivid depiction of overly punitive drug laws. Edie seems to have suffered from undiagnosed ADD and Tourette's Syndrom (TS). Rather than being pesecuted by her family for her abuse of amphetamine (as Stein's book horrifcly demonstrates), Edie should have been on a comfortable dose of d-amphetamine and a tricylic anti-depressant with some Clonidine. Stein's book gives us an example of why we need a more "poetic psychiatry".