The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

A rollicking memoir by one of the greatest (and most outrageous) supermodels of the 1970s.Janice Dickinson was not only the first of the supermodels, she endured a nightmarishly traumatic childhood at the hands of a sadistic, sexually and emotionally abusive father, and emerged in the early 1970s as the first lush-lipped 'exotic' brunette to break into a modelling world dominated by sunny California blondes.Janice owned the modelling world in the 1970s. Animated by a fierce desire to be recognised, a fearless spirit, and an insatiable hunger for alcohol, cocaine, sex, and fun, Dickinson appeared on every magazine cover, worked with every major designer and photographer (from Calvin Klein and Gianni Versace to Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon), was married three times, and had passionate affairs or one-night stands with everyone from Warren Beatty to Jack Nicholson to Mick Jagger. Though her career waned in the 1990s, her dramatic life story did not: in recent years she has fought a hotly contested paternity suit with Sylvester Stallone, survived a near-fatal car wreck during a tequila/marijuana blackout in St Bart's, and waged a raging battle with alcohol and drug addiction.

A good book. I love how she weaved Cooper's fictional characters Natty Bumppo and Chief Chingachgook into the story. I forget about the sadness of the Cooper characters and just remember the adventure. Groff reminds me how heartbreaking their stories are and how lonely those two (fictional) men must have been. My problems with the book were 1) The family mystery was not very compelling. But they never are. I guess after reading Possession, everything else in that vein of academic research and family background disappoints. 2) Her mother wasn't as impressive as her character kept saying she was. I just didn't get her strength or appeal. I would read more by Groff though. And can't wait to discuss it with book club!

I really liked this book. The story was interesting and so were the characters. The way it was written, weaving both the old and the new stories in a detective type story was fun to read.

I came to this, the first of Lauren Groff's books, after admiring the intuition in her more recent work. Her short story collection Florida will go down as one of the best books I've read this year. The Monsters of Templeton, though, is overly ambitious with its era-spanning narration and convoluted genealogy, lacking in the depth of her other work. The scope here is too grand, with a mystery that is in itself pointless from the beginning. Though my expectations were high, I don't know that I would have been any less disappointed by this novel had I come to it unfamiliar with Groff's work. I may be unimpressed with this work, but it does demonstrate the growth in the abilities of its author. I look forward to reading her next work.