Richard Ekstract, Magazine Publisher With Link to Warhol, Dies at 92

He was promoting a new trade journal, Tape Recording, when he lent a video recorder to Andy Warhol, who used it to make a classic work with Edie Sedgwick.

By Penelope Green

Aug. 30, 2023

Richard Ekstract, a magazine publisher who found success with niche audiences — from trade journals like Tape Recording and Audio Times to a regional shelter franchise that started with Hamptons Cottages and Gardens — and played a curious role in Andy Warhol’s career, died on Aug. 7 in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 92.

His death, in a hospital, was announced by his son Steven. The cause was cancer.

Mr. Ektract was a media mogul of sorts, having amassed a small fortune creating a cottage industry of some 20 trade and consumer publications, moving from electronics to video to decorating and real estate. But he may be best remembered for an early collaboration with Warhol.

In the summer of 1965, Mr. Ekstract, then a budding trade journal publisher in New York with one title under his belt, Audio Times, lent Warhol, who had been making 16-millimeter films, a prototype of a Norelco “slant-track” video camera. (It was a few months before Nam June Paik, the so-called father of video art, got his first Sony video recorder.)

Mr. Ekstract had met Warhol a few years earlier through an art director and, knowing Warhol’s frugality, would often lend him equipment.

The clunky white Norelco was a one-off, expensive and difficult to use, but Warhol played with it for a month, creating a landmark work, the affecting “Outer and Inner Space.” The film, in a split-screen format, starred the magnetic, doomed Edie Sedgwick delivering dueling monologues: Perched on a stool, she opines on this and that as a video of her opining on this and that, but less clearly, plays next to her.

J. Hoberman, writing in The New York Times, called the film “a masterpiece of video art made before the term even existed.”

In exchange for the use of the video camera, Warhol gave Mr. Ekstract a collection of acetates he had used the year before to make a series of red silk-screened self-portraits. With Warhol’s permission, Mr. Ekstract took them to a commercial printer, who made a second set of self-portraits, following Warhol’s directions given over the phone.

As part of the deal, one of the portraits would appear in Mr. Ekstract’s new magazine, Tape Recording. To celebrate the magazine’s debut, Mr. Ekstract, with characteristic flair, threw a party on abandoned rail tracks underneath the Waldorf Astoria hotel. The portraits were exhibited — and given away to a few of the magazine’s sponsors — and “Inner and Outer Space” was screened.

The red self-portraits had a complicated afterlife. One of them had been bought by a filmmaker named Joe Simon-Whelan in 1989 and became the subject of a long and bitter lawsuit. Despite ample documentation about its origins, when Mr. Simon-Whelan asked to have the work authenticated by the Warhol Foundation, his request was denied multiple times. He sued, and in 2010, after the foundation had spent $7 million in legal fees, Mr. Simon-Whelan gave up, having run out of money to continue.

Mr. Ekstract kept one of the red portraits for himself. Last year, he offered it to an auction house in Arizona, but the piece failed to sell.

Richard Evan Ekstract was born on Feb. 20, 1931, in Brooklyn to Max and Mildred (Last) Ekstract. His father was in the apparel business; his mother was a homemaker. Richard grew up in Philadelphia and studied journalism at Temple University. He joined the Army in 1952 as a lieutenant and served at Fort Benning, Ga., where he became the editor of Infantry magazine.

Mr. Ekstract’s first magazine of his own was Audio Times, a weekly trade journal. By the end of its first year it had no revenue to speak of, until Avery Fisher, the audio electronics pioneer and philanthropist, signed on as its first advertiser.

Mr. Ekstract’s last publishing venture was the Cottages and Gardens franchise. Hamptons Cottages and Gardens began as a free biweekly shelter magazine in the summer of 2002 and soon spawned spinoffs: Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens and Connecticut Cottages and Gardens.

The magazines were distinctive for using original photography instead of pickup pictures of interiors and for generally punching above their weight as regional freebies, giving them the look and feel of national magazines. Advertisers responded, and locals — from old money types to the newly flush — opened their showplaces to the editors.

“Richard was a maverick in magazine publishing at a level that surprised some people,” Newell Turner, the first editor of HC & G, as it was known for short, said in a phone interview. (Mr. Turner went on to be editor of House Beautiful magazine and then editorial director of the Hearst Design Group.) “He got into the shelter magazine world on a local basis when others didn’t see much value there. But he realized there was a huge interest in it, particularly in the Hamptons, and he was right.

“Because of the audience — the creative and business classes of New York City — the magazine had a huge power,” he continued. “He saw the importance of micro-audiences, and he was revolutionary in that he believed a free magazine could still be worth someone picking it up and reading it.”

Mr. Ekstract’s tastes were eclectic. He was opinionated, strong willed and colorful in his language. He was notorious for hiring and firing, running through 10 publishers in the first five years of HC & G.

In addition to magazines, “Richard collected art and architecture,” said Alexander Gorlin, who designed a Tuscan villa for Mr. Ekstract on the site of a former estate in East Hampton, one of a number of houses he built and flipped on the East End of Long Island. “But everything was for sale.”

He is survived by his wife, Eileen, whom he married in 1990; his daughter, Janet; his sons Steven and Michael; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Claudia Tucker ended in divorce.

In the spring of 2008, as the recession deepened, Mr. Ekstract put his Cottages and Gardens franchise on the market. A year and a half later, it was bought by Marianne Howatson, a veteran magazine publisher, for an undisclosed sum.

But Mr. Ekstract, with typical brio, told The New York Post that the downturn was not the reason for the sale.

“I’m 77,” he said. “It’s enough already. I have nothing left to prove.”

Congratulations to my friend Neil Plakcy who just published an engaging short story in his Mahu Investigations series. All proceeds from the story, “Maui Strong,” will go to the Maui Strong Fund.

The new short story is a way for Neil to honor the Aloha state that he adores so much. He has written 13 best selling books about a gay homicide detective in Honolulu who solves crimes in the most masterful way. The new short story takes place in Maui.

You can pick up your copy here: https://books2read.com/u/3yQax6
or on Amazon https://amzn.to/3YQFMMo RW

🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺

P-Town (sad) ferry ride to Boston. Then water taxi from Boston dock to Logan airport. Then AA to Miami.

BY ALEX GREENBERGER

Claude Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso’s four children, has died at 76. The news was first reported on Thursday by Agence France-Presse, which did not provide a cause of death.

He died within months of his mother, the artist Françoise Gilot, who passed away in June at 101, and during the 50th anniversary commemorations of the death of his father, whose work is the subject of numerous museum exhibitions around the world right now. (Among their survivors are Gilot’s daughter, Paloma Picasso.)

In his capacity as the court-appointed administrator of the Picasso estate, a position he held from 1989 to earlier this year, Claude worked alongside his father’s many descendants to steward the artist’s legacy. The business was not always smooth sailing, as conflicts between members of the Picasso family periodically arose in public-facing ways.

Before Pablo Picasso had even died, in 1970, Claude, then aged 22, sued in France to be recognized as the legitimate son of his father, which would officially make Claude an heir. A court eventually ruled in his and his sister Paloma’s favor, making them legal heirs to Picasso four years later, after the artist had died in 1973.

It was the first in a number of internal battles among the Picasso family that would unfold across the next few decades. Many of those conflicts pitted Claude against other of Picasso’s heirs, including his second wife Jacqueline Roque; his half-sister Maya Widmaier-Picasso, whose mother was Marie-Thérèse Walter; and Picasso’s grandchildren Marina Picasso and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the children of the artist’s eldest son, Paul Picasso, via his first wife Olga Khokhlova.

The most explosive standoff took place in 1999, when Claude sold the Picasso name and signature to PSA Peugeot-Citroen, which released car titled after the artist. Marina sued Claude, claiming that he had disrespected “one of the greatest painters, a genius.” Queried about the situation, Claude’s lawyer told the Guardian: “Claude Ruiz Picasso is recognised by a majority of the five surviving heirs as being perfectly entitled to exploit the Picasso brand name.”

In interviews, Claude said he never thought he would play such a role. “I never expected or desired to have any kind of role like this, or have any influence over my father’s legacy,” he once told Picasso biographer John Richardson.

Speaking of his late brother, he added, “Paul also said, shortly before he died, ‘You know, if we’re in the shit we’re in, it’s all your fault.’”

Claude Picasso was born in 1947. He studied in England and France, and went on to live in New York between 1967 and 1974. He was briefly an assistant to the famed photographer Richard Avedon; he became a photojournalist himself.

In 1989, Claude became the court-appointed administrator of the Picasso estate, Succession Picasso. Through the role, he controlled the use of Picasso’s copyright. He held the position until July, when his sister Paloma took over.

He could be ornery about his father’s legacy. In 2018, he once said that a good amount of Picasso shows are “not necessary” and that Paris’s Musée Picasso was doing too much lending. He said that many works in the collection were not in a position to travel as frequently as they did it and that the “tsunami” of exhibitions taking place include many which are “nondescript and do nothing more than surf on the magic of a great name.”

Among the exhibitions this year to have feature loans from that museum is the negatively reviewed “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Yet Claude also seemed to take great pride in his work for the estate. “There’s still a lot to learn from Picasso,” he told Richardson.

Dealer Larry Gagosian said in a statement, “He was a dedicated guardian and interpreter of his father’s legacy, leading the Picasso Administration since its founding and enthusiastically supporting international scholarship and exhibitions. He was an extraordinary man and a great friend. Our hearts go out to all of Claude’s family. He will be profoundly missed.”

The Fine Arts Work Center is just a few blocks from the White Porch Inn Art Hotel, the bed and breakfast that we make our home every trip to P-Town. We attended an artist panel discussion yesterday that was a real eye opener into the lives of people who paint, sculpture, and write. The FAWC features artist studios; live-work residences; the Michael Mazur Print Shop; a reading library and bookstore; the Stanley Kunitz Common Room and Hudson D. Walker Galleries, where they host year round readings, artist talks, exhibitions, and live performance.

The FAWC selects 20 Fellows to live and work in Provincetown from October 1 – April 30. The Fellowship is designed for emerging artists and writers to focus solely on their creative practice. Fellows share their work as part of the winter public program, which also includes lectures and readings from visiting artists and writers.

During late spring and early fall, past Fellows

and friends of the Work Center return to Provincetown for short term stays during our Returning Residency program, which offers artists and writers dedicated time to advance creative projects and ideas.

Summer Workshops

Every summer, they welcome students and faculty for a full season of open enrollment, multidisciplinary course offerings in literature, visual art, playwriting, and more. This program includes over 50 public events that are free and open to the community.

24PearlStreet Online Writing Workshops

All year, they offer online learning opportunities of varying lengths and skill levels through online writing program 24PearlStreet, where writers can work with esteemed poets, prose writers, and graphic novelists in small group, virtual settings.

Eliot and I plan to attend as many events at the FAWC as possible next summer. Thank you P-Town friends for introducing us to FAWC.

The campus

Tom Ford Pays $52 Million for Jackie Kennedy’s Childhood Home in the Hamptons

After upgrading to a larger Florida mansion, the fashion mogul picked up a historic New York estate. 

By WENDY BOWMAN

Google Earth; Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Barely eight months ago, Tom Ford paid private equity guru Rob Heyvaert an eye-popping $51 million for a sleekly designed contemporary mansion in Palm Beach. But just weeks ago — as part of an off-market deal that’s expected to top $100 million, per The Real Deal — the fashion mogul traded that place to Brian Kosoy, CEO of the real estate private equity firm the Sterling Organization, in exchange for his even larger South Florida spread.

Now Ford has turned his attention toward New York, having forked over an equally impressive sum of cash for a historic East Hamptons estate that once served as a summer getaway for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Records show Ford paid media producer David Zander $52 million for the home, which was originally listed for $55 million. The residence was previously owned by fashion designer and retail executive Reed Krakoff and his wife Delphine, who sold it to Zander for $24 million in 2018. And way before that, the property known as Lasata—a Native American word meaning “Place of Peace”—was owned in the 1920s by the former First Lady’s paternal grandfather John Vernou Bouvier Jr.

Nestled amid a 7-acre parcel of land, just blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, Ford’s newly acquired compound was designed by architect Arthur C. Jackson and completed in 1917. Recently restored by its current owner, the multi-building property is highlighted by an eight-bedroom main home sporting 8,500 square feet of Pierre Yovanovich-designed living space boasting tall casement windows and beamed ceilings throughout.

Ford, a Texas native who recently sold his eponymous fashion label to Estée Lauder Cos. in a deal valued at around $2.8 billion, also maintains a Holmby Hills estate he paid late socialite Betsy Bloomingdale nearly $40 million for in 2016, as well as homes in New York City, London and Santa Fe.

There’s also a two-bedroom guesthouse, caretaker’s cottage, pool house and three-car garage with a workshop, plus Louis Benech-crafted grounds laced with lush lawns, mature specimen trees and a flower meadow.

The Lasata listing was held by Eileen O’Neill of Corcoran Group and Ed Petrie of Compass; Frank E. Newbold of Sotheby’s International Realty repped Ford.

.

T commissioned the artist Trenton Doyle Hancock to make an original painting — “No, Only Black People Can Buy My Art” (2023) — about artists being more selective in the sale of their work.

Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Izzy Leung

By M.H. Miller

Aug. 14, 2023

IN JANUARY 2020, less than two months before galleries around the world closed to the public because of Covid-19, Lauren Halsey had a solo show at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. She was exhibiting works about the historically Black community in South Central — where she was born, raised and still works — which is physically quite close to the gallery in Mid-Wilshire but is spiritually farther away. A big crowd came to the opening to see Halsey’s large-scale sculptural installations, which resembled storefront signage, some featuring protest slogans. “Reparations Now! In Memory of Our Black Ancestors,” one of them read. “Black Workers Rising! For Jobs Justice & Dignity,” said another.

But the show soon caught the art world’s attention for a different reason after a white collector posted on Twitter what he claimed to be a note attached to a sales list from the gallery, which indicated that a number of Halsey’s works were not for sale. Or at least not for sale to him.

According to the gallery, in a statement released to Artnet at the time, “Per the artist’s wishes, we reserved certain (not all) sculptures from this body of work for people of color and public collections.”

Halsey, 36, wanted her art to be acquired — to be lived with — by a diverse group of owners who’d have a special appreciation for the artist’s overall project, which is dedicated, as she’s put it, to “the empowerment and transcendence of Black and brown folks sociopolitically, economically, intellectually and artistically.”

With the exception of a co-op apartment, buying a work of art is unlike buying anything else in America. Just because you have the funds to purchase a painting doesn’t mean you can. Since the art world has few formal regulations, it’s guided instead by longstanding rules of decorum: Galleries, which are responsible for discovering artists and fostering their careers, generally take a 50 percent cut, exponentially higher than that of manager equivalents in other creative fields. And visual artists, unlike any other cultural producer, receive no official percentage in residuals, thanks in large part to the outdated first-sale doctrine in U.S. copyright law. This has helped make flipping art at auction a common revenue-generating practice among a certain collector class.

One way that artists and galleries have protected themselves from speculative buyers is by making potential owners audition for the privilege of purchasing art. A first-time buyer can expect to be questioned by a gallery, with no apparent irony, about what other works they have in their collection. Another collector might need to promise to buy two works by the same artist: one they vow not to sell at auction, the other they pledge to give to a museum. Some artists have had success with other strategies.

Major works by the painter Julie Mehretu have only rarely been resold at auction, which has made her work among the most expensive by a living artist — there’s never enough supply to meet the demand. The conceptual artist David Hammons spent much of his career not showing in white-owned galleries and making difficult-to-sell works, preferring to exhibit in public areas like vacant lots.

A work by Lauren Halsey, “Reparations Now + Welcome Family,” which was included in the artist’s 2020 exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.

Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane

Historically, the artists who’ve made collectors prove their good intentions have been those, like Hammons and Mehretu, with enough power and influence to make the business bend to their will. Most artists have no autonomy, which means that once their work leaves the studio and goes to the gallery, their involvement with it is through. Lately, though, the practice of auditioning collectors has changed, especially as galleries and museums attempt to elevate work by artists who’ve long been neglected or ignored by mainstream institutions. A younger, more diverse generation of artists are asking for more control over how their work gets sold and to whom. Their motivation is as much cultural — and personal — as it is financial.

ONE OF THOSE artists is Janiva Ellis, whose paintings she once described as “inherently Black because I am.” She said it was witnessing the art world’s “gross and stressful” embrace of Black painters, especially figurative painters who focus on Black lives, during the protests against racial injustice in 2020 that “encouraged me to be more intentional” in deciding who gets to collect her work. At 35, she has a resale agreement that grants her residuals so long as she’s living, and she’s tried to prioritize what she calls “safe stewardship.”

Black artists are not the only ones pushing against precedent. Queer artists — another historically marginalized group — are also fighting for the same rights. These efforts have unsettled standard practices in an industry that remains overwhelmingly white, and attempts by artists of color and others seeking a more equitable share have proven controversial enough that few art-world figures are willing to talk about the subject. Ellis was an exception: She agreed to speak on the record but only over email in a conversation mediated by her gallery, 47 Canal in New York, where a representative told me, “She is open to talking, but I hope you understand that we’d like to be cautious as we approach this.” Both Halsey and Kordansky declined to comment on the details of the sales contract for her show in 2020.

Among collectors, the response has varied. Gardy St. Fleur, an art adviser originally from Haiti who has helped galleries place works by artists of color with “people who look like them,” said it was important to find collectors who will truly value a work rather than cash in on what’s popular. “For some people,” he said, “it’s cool they collect Black art, but they’re not hanging that stuff in their home. I’ve dealt with collectors who will want to collect Black artists, but then they’ll just put them directly into storage.” But Komal Shah, a philanthropist and former tech executive who grew up in India and now lives in California among some 300 pieces of art made by women and artists of color, told me that the idea of sorting collectors by race left her feeling “a little dismayed — because works by Black artists going to Black collectors does not really make for a broader acceptance.” It was the same logic, she said, as arguing that art by women can only be enjoyed by women: “To me, that sounds almost like death upon arrival.”

One of the people who bought Halsey’s work at the 2020 show at Kordansky was the visual artist Rashid Johnson, who’s spent his career making works that subtly and often ambiguously center Black identity. “If Lauren feels that she’s empowered and feels rewarded by having her work located in the homes of Black families, then that is absolutely her right as an artist,” he told me. “I’m not even sure it has to be viewed as an activist position. I think to view it as an activist position is to condition the experience of Blackness as one that is inherently radical. Whiteness is nothing if not great at centering itself. This act by a young Black woman saying this is what she wants for her work can be taken by a white audience as somehow being about them — when she has explicitly said that this is about the Black folks [whom she wants] to acquire the work, not about a rejection of whiteness.”

Johnson is also one of the few artists who’s made work that explicitly addresses the idea of white ownership of Black art. In 2019, he directed a film adaptation of “Native Son,” based on Richard Wright’s 1940 novel about the tragedy that results after a 20-year-old Black man, Bigger Thomas, is hired as a driver by the Daltons, a wealthy white family in Chicago. In the book, the Dalton patriarch is also Bigger Thomas’s landlord, the owner of the rat-infested building where Bigger lives with his mother, sister and brother. In the film, which updates the story, Bigger is a lover of punk music, and Mr. Dalton is a philanthropist and an art collector. The walls of his mansion are covered in works by Sam Gilliam, Deana Lawson, Glenn Ligon, Henry Taylor and Johnson himself — all Black artists the art market has recently anointed as valuable. Mr. Dalton’s taste in Black art is intentionally difficult to interpret. “There’s a read of this where we recognize that Dalton sees the opportunity to invest in a group of voices with incredibly thoughtful and critical ways of amplifying their thinking,” Johnson said. “There’s a more sinister read that could imagine Dalton as opportunistic. There’s also the hybrid read, which is the place where I think we mostly live.” In that case, Johnson said, Dalton “is all of the above.” As a prominent man of wealth, he’s certainly able to buy this work. But left unanswered is the question of whether he truly has the right to it.

Kordansky, who is also Johnson’s dealer in Los Angeles, makes a cameo in “Native Son” as the owner of a record store that Bigger frequents. Really, he’s playing a stand-in for the contemporary art world, or for the way the business has operated until recently. Bigger’s experience in the store parallels the alienation many people feel when they walk into a gallery. He inquires about an LP on display behind the store’s counter, a rare 1976 promo by the short-lived but influential Detroit punk band Death, which was one of the few bands that looked like Bigger within a largely white milieu. Kordansky’s character regards Bigger’s interest as unworthy. “This, man?” he says. “There’s one in the Smithsonian.” It’s a real collector’s item, and he won’t even say the price.

Jackie Collins at work, in 1969.

INSIDE STORY

Business and Pleasure

Forty years after Jackie Collins wrote Hollywood Wives, the hugely popular novel that skewered the Beverly Hills elite, her daughter reflects on the power of Collins’s books—and her insistence on fun at all costs

BY RORY GREEN

In 1983, my mother, the author Jackie Collins, published her ninth novel, Hollywood Wives, two years after moving our family from London to Los Angeles. The book went viral, long before content was contagious. Hollywood Wives sold more than 15 million copies.

All over the world, copies of the book could be found dog-eared and devoured at poolsides, on beaches and airplanes, and in bedrooms. Her demographic reached wide, and the book was unstoppable, unapologetic, unwavering in its scrutiny of Hollywood socialites, and utterly compulsive.

I think my mother’s books might have coined the term “guilty pleasure.” But my mother was wasting no time on guilt—her only concern was with pleasure.

Meanwhile, in 1983, I was around 13 years old, and while other teenagers were sneaking my mum’s books from their parents’ bedside tables, I was reading Judy Blume and writing moody poetry, entirely unaware of the archetypal influence my mother was wielding in her study down the hall. I didn’t start to read my mother’s books until many years later, but truly it is only now that I can look back and see the courage and canniness it took for her to write so boldly and hone her craft in the male-dominated world of publishing, which all too often tried to dismiss her talent as “trash.” Collins with her daughters Rory (center) and Tiffany, in 1969.

My mother loved telling me and my sisters that “girls can do anything!” And while my own observations of the world around me didn’t always corroborate that, my observations of my mother did.

On one hand she embraced a certain domesticity, doing the laundry and packing our school lunches, even at the height of her fame. On the other hand, she was a rebel, refusing to be defined by societal expectations, including the disapproving glare of her own father. When I was a teen, it was an oft-cited family legend that when she was not much older than I was, she was stuffing pillows under her covers after her mother kissed her good night and climbing out of her bedroom window in search of adventure.

One night in the 80s, she was held up at gunpoint in the driver’s seat of her car while dropping her friend home from a dinner party. She could have frozen. She could have surrendered and handed over the car. But instead, like a crazy kick-ass character from one of her books, she threw the car into reverse and sped away from the danger. The gunman was so shocked, he didn’t shoot.

That was one of her superpowers—shocking people. She was good at it, too, and loved turning the tables, on men, especially, and making them feel as uncomfortable as they had likely made her, and innumerable other women, feel.Collins at the Beverly Hills home she designed herself, in 1995. 

My mother’s feminism was rooted in a fiery outrage at the inequality between men and women. This theme singes each page of her more than 30 books and set the world on fire when she wrote Hollywood Wives. She had infiltrated the elite inner circles of Hollywood’s rich and famous, blending in seamlessly, all the while taking notes. Her work was far from trash—it was the treasure that helped pave the path for movements like #Time’sUp and #MeToo.

My mother, who died in 2015, gave me the gift of a voice. I learned a great deal from her—not just from her writer’s voice, which was uniquely her own, but also from her fearlessness in speaking up and out.

She once sued a magazine distributed by Larry Flynt (of Hustler) because they published a nude picture of a woman and claimed it was her. After she died, we found a letter from Mr. Flynt which charmingly opened with the line “Get off your high horse you fuckin’ bitch.” That was the level of vitriol she had to contend with from men who felt threatened by her power. She never lowered herself to their depths. She held on to a sustained belief in herself that I can still feel resonating in me today.Promoting Hollywood Wives in London. 

Hollywood Wives is 40 years old, and my mother has been gone for almost eight of those years. We still hear from writers and readers all the time citing her as an inspiration, sometimes a lifeline, always a pleasure.

I recently re-read Hollywood Wives, and it was a riot all over again—irreverent, revealing, hilarious. If you miss her, I’d recommend picking it up one more time. I guarantee you will remember exactly where you were when you first opened those tantalizing pages—who can forget the pool guy pissing a perfect arc into Elaine Conti’s pool?

And if you’ve never read it before, you’re in for a treat. Indulge yourself and walk away satiated and guilt-free. Exactly what Jackie always intended …