Valley of the Dolls is a zipper-ripper that has been called trashy, tawdry, glitzy, lusty, sordid and seamy — and that's just the beginning of its appeal.

Valley Of The Dolls can be enjoyed as the ultimate plush, trash, human-interest story - three decades of gossip columns distilled into one fat novel - but also as a document of some cultural interest, published as it was in 1966, but spanning the years from optimistic postwar 1945 to world-weary pre-deluge 1963. Kierkegaard's theorem that life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards has been used as an excuse to dignify a lot of silly, frivolous cultural frills and furbelows with far greater significance than they actually had - including the mini-skirt, Barbie dolls and atheism. But the sheer breadth and depth of this particular disco-ball gives it lasting clout.