Not pretty enough

Gerri Hirshey, a writer and reporter, offers a thoroughly researched life of Helen Gurley Brown, a figure who drew both admiration and hostility. Brown's 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl sold over two million copies within three weeks. It anticipated the self-help craze and helped shape the confident voice of second wave feminism. In it she argued that women should feel free to have sex outside marriage, that equality should reach the bedroom, and that paid work was central to a woman's independence and sense of worth. The book made her a national name and a polarizing feminist voice. Her candor about sexuality and her focus on bonds between women still echo in shows such as Sex and the City and Girls, and throughout magazine publishing. When she died in 2012, The New York Times put her obituary on its front page, crediting her with shaping the look of today's women's magazines. Brown's rise from a poor childhood in the Arkansas Ozarks, through her eventful single years in Los Angeles and her magazine career in New York, to a Hollywood life with her film producer husband, reads like a classic American success story. Hirshey recounts how Brown became the best-paid woman in advertising copywriting on the West Coast and turned Hearst's struggling literary magazine, Cosmopolitan, into the global women's brand it is now. Friends and acquaintances, including Liz Smith, Gloria Vanderbilt and Barbara Walters, share their memories, alongside people who crossed her path briefly, such as a 1939 prom date, a business school sorority sister and Cosmopolitan cover models Beverly Johnson and Brooke Shields. Brown's own voice also comes through, making this a portrait of a woman who was often criticized but never ignored.