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. ( )

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. ( )

This is a great oral history of Edie Sedgwick, her family, and the Factory scene in the 1960s. It should be opulent, glamorous and enviable, but is really squalid and depressing. The early part of the book dealing with her family and childhood is just terrible to read, it's so dysfunctional, her father was a monster really. And this theme continues after she moves to New York and falls in with the Factory set. There are so many great anecdotes peppered throughout the book, and it's often funny as well as riveting. The author interviewed many many people connected to Edie throughout her life and the structure works really well to describe this multi-faceted person, and the times she lived in. ( )

A good read and somewhat under-appreciated due to its subject matter of Pop and Warhol. ( )

http://wineandabook.com/2013/01/21/review-edie-american-girl-by-jean-stein/

After reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids, I was inspired to pick up Stein’s biography of Edie Sedgwick. I tend to let one reading choice inspire another. For example, once I read the biography of the Mitford sisters, I immediately picked up Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, whose relationship with the sisters had been discussed. Smith, in her memoir, mentioned her teenage interest in Sedgwick, which prompted me to remember I had her biography sitting on the bookshelf unread. (n.b. I also tend to buy books at a pace that exceeds my ability to read them, so quite a bit of my personal library remains unread…and I imagine, the way I buy books, this will continue to be the case).

Edie Sedgwick’s story is, at the same time, glamorous and tragic. Born into a family as eccentric as it is dysfunctional, Edie was sent to several psychiatric institutions throughout her teen years before defecting from college to New York, where she met Andy Warhol and was deemed a “super star.”

Stein’s decision for the biography to be composed of incredibly well-edited interviews was genius, in my opinion. Edie herself was a bit of an enigma; even people who were the closest to her didn’t seem to ever know her completely, so to it seemed fitting to piece the story of her life together via the people who knew all the different parts of her.

Edie had an amazing sense of personal style. She was absolutely a trendsetter and an individual, and who knows what sort of impact she could have had on the fashion and art worlds if drugs hadn’t been the issue that they were. Through Stein’s interviews and Plimpton’s expert editing, Edie is a riveting read that is fascinating on multiple levels: as the story of a family, as the story of a troubled girl, as a unique glimpse into the art world, and as the story of an era.

Rubric rating: 9. ( )