Edie: An American Biography

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.

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 show more 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. show less

This book helped me hate Andy Warhol just a little less, because it is clear he was not responsible for the denigration and demise of Edie Sedgwick. Edie was going to end up dead of an overdose or a suicide attempt one way or the other, and while Andy was a parasite, the blame for his death cannot be laid at his doorstep.

Mostly this book was interesting in a voyeuristic manner. I felt a similar sense of looking into the lives of a certain sort of elite when reading about John Cheever's life. This book stands as a direct refutation to the old canard that the rich are not like us - they are better. Fuzzy Sedgwick, Edie's father, was a living emblem of how money can lead one to believe one is almost a God. His arrogance destroyed his show more children and his weak wife stood by and let it happen. Two sons committed suicide, Edie died of a drug overdose, the eldest daughter cut off ties with most of her family and it was all a direct result of having a lecherous, nasty, arrogant, self-absorbed narcissist for a father.

In a way, this book, told via the remembrances of those who knew Edie and her family, is a third party examination of how women with borderline personality are created. Because from the perspective of armchair psychology, Edie was definitely a borderline.

There were a couple of moments wherein I literally cringed when reading of Edie's behavior. After she had left The Factory, Edie fell in with a group of bikers. She had no sense of the danger she was courting, as she was genuinely convinced of her charm. According to a man called Preacher Ewing, Edie would flirt and tease the bikers at bars and, had it not been for a couple of male friends who prevented it, she was opening herself up to a gang rape. She was so accustomed to being the most beautiful and sought-after girl in the room, and having dealt with the dregs that were often attracted to Andy Warhol, she had an over-inflated sense of her desirability and the civility her money and quasi-fame bought her.

This was a terribly sad book in so many ways. But, like most tales of how the mighty have fallen, it was a fast, gripping read. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

In this tragic and transfixing book presented as a series of transcribed interviews with those that knew her and in imitation of Warhol's verite cinamatic style we slowly discover an emotionaly fragile society girl almost pre-programed for self destruction as she is seduced by a world of drug driven sex, art, fashion and music, surrounded by the famous and infamous very willing to use her but unable or unwilling to help her, primarily the enigmatic voyouer Andy Warhol.

This is a very well-written biography. Read it even if you think Edie was completely vapid and uninteresting.