I read this book a couple of years ago when I was really into the 1960s aesthetically and I absolutely raced through it. It perfectly captures New York (and in general America) in the 1960s and the burst of the post-modern art scene led by Andy Warhol. However, it does so in an intensely personal way, focusing entirely on Edie Sedgwick, a model, muse, actress and self-destructive victim of Warhol and his art machine.
Sedgwick has remained in the cultural milieu mainly because she "shone so bright" and then died young. There have been many portrayals of her on film and she is often cited as a style and overall touchstone for "it girls". Stein and Plimpton's biography of her captures the charisma and decline of Sedgwick and helps the reader understand why she is considered as special as she is. In a way her rise and fall aligns with that of the alternative art scene of the 1960s, at one point considered so glamorous and aspirational and then falling apart in drug addiction and poverty. Sedgwick is so closely related to this particular time and place that she kind of stands in as the personification of it.
What I really liked about the biography is that instead of being told in a straight-forward narrative like most it is told almost exclusively through interviews with those that knew her. Although the "narrative", for lack of a better word, is linear different people bring out different sides to all of the stories and aspects of her life. Because Stein and Plimpton present Sedgwick's life this way it comes across as being more personal and more truthful; inconsistencies and contradictions are left in as if Stein and Plimpton are aware that there can no longer be an absolute truth when it comes to recalling Sedgwick's life. That it was and continues to be so embellished and almost mythologized that they just let the inconsistencies lay where they fall. I have written before about how I prefer biographies to be a little bit different because today the basic story of someone's (particularly someone famous) life is so easily accessibly on websites like Wikipedia. This definitely ticks off all the boxes for me.
Overall I really enjoyed reading Edie and thoroughly recommend it if you enjoy biographies or even if your are interested in social history.
Have you read this book? What did you think? Feel free to let me know in the comments!
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Lots of love,
xoxo
*This post was not sponsored, all opinions are my own. Above image is not mine, sourced from here.
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