When it comes to Jacqueline Susann it is easy to just think "Valley of the Dolls"--the classic damnation of drugs, Hollywood and the 60s... It is a book near perfect in it's capturing of the excess and ambitions of the period, the type of calling card some authors spend their lives hoping for. Because of that, it is easy to ignore the rest of her works which is a shame because she grew more interesting and more faceted as she went.
Dolores is one of her shortest novels, her final one, barely finished before she passed away from cancer. It is her trickiest novel, a thinly veiled tell-all about a first lady widowed, a fashion plate left adrift in her grief and what she does to bounce back. Susann had the taste to acknowledge the similarities to Jacqueline Kennedy by making several pointed references to her story as being similar...
But Dolores also stands on it's own as an indictment against wealth and excess, a fable about what happens when you have everything around you but nothing inside you. It is a glamorous and sexy as her previous works but also more jaded, more self aware and more raw because of it. Dolores is a beach read for the hipster, the ironic and the rubberneckers of society.
It's a hell of a note to go out on,
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