It was likely with tongue in cheek that Andy Warhol titled one of his movies starring Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971) Poor Little Rich Girl. That's precisely how the world saw Sedgwick: "The gossip columns called her a debutante, an heiress, and a Boston Brahmin, but Edie was nothing of the sort." So writes Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Sedgwick's older sister, in As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy, a remarkable biography centered on a tragic American icon.
As It Turns Out has three parts, each of which offers a different approach to its subject, beginning with an expansive look at life for the eight Sedgwick children on the family ranch in California. The book's second part is a deep dive into the pivotal year of 1965, when Sedgwick and Warhol were the toast of underground New York. The third is a critical assessment (Wohl is a translator of several books on art) of Warhol's work and Sedgwick's place in it.
With her death at age 28 from a barbiturate overdose, the bewitching Sedgwick was frozen in amber in the public's eye. But Wohl makes a good dent in the mythology of her sister, whom she has come to see as "entirely and genuinely herself at all times." As It Turns Out is a headstrong book with an enticingly conversational tone and heartbreak at every turn: "A beautiful, ideal family leading a beautiful, ideal life was the image... I would have given anything to be part of it." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer