Jean Stein (1) (1934–2017)

I loved the "oral history" compilation style of the book, and really enjoyed the different voices of those people telling the story.

I first read this book when I was still in high school, and it was a real eye opener for me to learn that a ruling class WASP family could be just as dysfunctional and messed up as the backwoods white trash families I was more familiar with. Fascinating, but still repulsive in a nicer, cleaner, more educated way.

It is just as much a book about an era as it is a book about a person. To me the early sixties in New York is just legendarily glamorous, if I had method of time travel, I would love to go back and see what it was like back then. I have a sort of love/hate view of the sixties.....love for the New York era, where people wore couture clothes and had fabulous hair and make-up; total disgust and disinterest for the California era of Haight-Ashbury hippies who were the worlds most unattractive looking (and smelling) people listening to music that sucked.

I'm not going to judge Edie, but I do find it very interesting that she has influenced or affected so many people.....when all she ever did was look good in the right place at the right time.… (more)

I have no idea why I borrowed this book, other than being drawn to biographies of unusual people - all I knew about Edie Sedgwick was that she was briefly Andy Warhol's muse and that Sienna Miller played her in a biopic. After reading this biography, by the far more interesting Jean Stein who died last year, I'm not sure I know much more! Edie was from a deeply dysfunctional family, like the Kennedys impersonating the Mitfords while on acid, she became an 'It' girl for a couple of years in the 60s after working with Warhol in his Factory studio, got hooked on drugs, fucked her life up, got married, and died at 28 (just missing the 27 Club, but then she was no Janis Joplin). That's it. If not for her photogenic face, I'm not sure anyone would know who she was.

The biography is told in sections, taken from interviews by the people who knew her, which takes a while to get used to. In some ways, this gives a fuller picture of the type of life Edie lived, but doesn't tell the reader anything about the subject herself. There are a couple of direct quotes from 'Ciao Manhattan', the film Edie starred in, but mostly she remains the property and the product of other people's memories.… (more)