![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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