I always find it mystifying that so many people continue to put such credence into the ideas pushed by awful people who lived unhappy, self-destructive lives:
The author of Peyton Place, says Foner, ‘was doing something on a cultural level that was extremely important. She was telling women it was OK to be sexual beings – to have the aspirations that men had.’
So an ugly, untalented woman who neglects her children managed to end up abandoned, bankrupt and dead at 39, naturally she is held up as a romantic figure worthy of emulation.
Cobbling together one novel of other people’s seamy stories is hardly a mark of literary greatness, if Metalious is to be considered an artistic success on the basis of the sales of the only book she managed to write herself, how much more greatness must we accord that multi-disciplinary genius, Jenna Jameson?
I think literary freaks of this sort are much to be preferred instead.