Helen Gurley Brown’s internationally influential career, as the author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan, is revealed in this intimate biography in 50 shades of pink. ‘Let it be understood at the outset,’ writes Gerri Hirshey, an American freelance journalist for many upmarket periodicals:
Sex has imbued the soft core, hard times and glory days of this story — sex surrendered, sex wielded, lavished and revelled in, sex merely endured and sometimes coolly transactional, sex reimagined, promised and packaged on glossy magazine covers for global dissemination…
Hirshey tells all about Helen’s life, every nook and cranny, from her childhood poverty in hillbilly Arkansas, steeply ascendant to the pizzazz of A-list Manhattan. She is a connoisseur of pizzazz, and her style is suitably ornate.
Helen’s father Ira was a brutal misogynist, nicknamed ‘Caveman Gurley’. Her mother, Cleo, experienced agonising obstetrical difficulties giving birth to Helen and her older sister Mary, was later crippled by polio, and was depressed and pessimistic ever after.
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