Mother’s Little Helpers: The Timelessness of Valley of the Dolls

There’s nothing quite like reading Valley of the Dolls for the first time. This year marks its 50th anniversary. According to the New York Times, the book has sold 31 million copies to date and 30 foreign editions. I picked up the book during my freshman year of college. I was expecting nothing more than a fun, frothy, scandal-filled soap opera, pulsing with beautiful faces and designer wardrobes. To my surprise, Jacqueline Susann’s novel was more than a glittery cornucopia of sex, drugs, and the bright lights of Tinseltown. Valley of the Dolls is a novel with sharp teeth. The novel is sympathetic to the plight of the main women, Anne Welles, Jennifer North, and Neely O’Hara, but this doesn’t mean that fate is a benevolent guardian. Unlike the film, the end of Susann’s novel is bleak, hinting that the characters will only further descend into unhappiness.

Although the novel was published in 1966, the themes are rather timeless. Money, power, fame, and the pursuit of everlasting glory. Idealized beauty viewed as the sole purpose of Hollywood starlets, beauty as an unreliable currency, the absence of beauty as the downfall of a woman once poised at the top of Mount Olympus. Drugs as distractions and coping mechanism steadily turned into unstable and sinister havens. In contrast to the Hippy-Dippy Flower Child stereotype of the 1960s, Valley of the Dolls is far from peace, love, and understanding. It’s a “grim fable,” Simon Donnan argued via Slate, “It’s Thomas Hardy dark. It’s Balzac bleak. It’s Dostoyevsky greige. Nothing ends well. Success corrupts. Fame destroys. Dreams become nightmares. Money corrodes. Rich men are pigs. Solid middle-class men are boring. Country life is stifling. Big cities are snake pits. Nobody is nice. Everyone is a mess. It is, in other words, the perfect mirror for today’s fame/money/free shoes culture.”

And what about those dolls? The Times noted that Girls creator, Lena Dunham, posted  a still from the movie on Instagram with a caption that questioned the portrayal of medication. She wrote, “Lately I’ve been noticing that nearly every pop cultural image we see of a woman on psychiatric medication is that of an out-of-control, exhausting and exhausted girl who needs help. But guess what? Most women on meds are women who have been brave enough to help themselves. It’s important that we see normalizing portrayals of people, women, choosing to take action when it comes to their mental health.” Though she does have a valid point about the stigmas surrounding mental health and medication, I don’t think that Valley of the Dolls vilifies mental health disorders or generalize that all medications are inherently evil. In fact, the dolls seem to function as one of the few forms of relief from the chaos and heartbreak of reality.