Scandalous Women: A Novel of Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann

Paul has created an engaging, innovative, and quicksilver-paced novel about the friendship between two titans of blockbuster fiction, Jacqueline Susann (1918–74) and Jackie Collins (1937–2015), although there is no record of them ever meeting in real life. Fans of both authors will find much to enjoy in this overall historically accurate portrait of two women who wrote sexy, compulsively readable novels and were castigated by critics while appealing to millions of people who didn’t previously buy or read books. Paul (who previously fictionalized Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden in A Beautiful Rival) cleverly uses Valley of the Dolls’ format of alternating chapters focusing on the three main characters: Jacqueline, Jackie, and Nancy, an ambitious publishing novice who champions and befriends the two authors. Through Nancy, readers meet numerous people who would later inspire characters in Susann and Collins’s novels. There is plenty of real-life drama for Paul to empathetically explore, including Susann’s cancer battles and financial concern for her son, whose autism she hid, and Collins’s troubled first marriage to a man who was biploar and later died by suicide.