Valley of the Dolls
Jacqueline Susann's 1966 novel follows three women, an aspiring singer, an actress, and a small-town secretary, as they meet in postwar New York and rise into careers in theater, film, and modeling. Across two decades the book tracks their loves, marriages, breakdowns, and the prescription pills, the dolls of the title, that they lean on harder as the work gets meaner. Susann drew on her own time inside Broadway and Hollywood, and the novel reads as both insider exposure and high melodrama. On release it became one of the fastest-selling novels in publishing history and an immediate cultural lightning rod. It has remained in print for sixty years.
What you might want to know about Valley of the Dolls
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Three young women chase fame in postwar New York and Hollywood, and the pills they call dolls slowly chase them back.
Barrymore chose it as one of her six favorite books in The Week in 2016, where she called it absolutely delicious and a book she keeps coming back to.
Susann always denied direct portraits, but readers and biographers have long matched her characters to figures she knew in midcentury theater and Hollywood.
Valley of the Dolls was written by Jacqueline Susann, published in 1966 by Grove Press.
Valley of the Dolls is 442 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Valley of the Dolls takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Valley of the Dolls is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
