Born into a family of wealthy and patrician New Englanders, the beautiful Edie Sedgwick became, in the 1960s, an emblem of, and memorial to the doomed world spawned by Andy Warhol. The book is edited down from conversations with hundreds of people who knew her: her immediate family, elderly members of the establishment, famous writers, the glitterati, underground figures, Hells Angels and others. The effect is a book illuminating a wide spectrum of American society and, in particular, the phenomenon of the Sixties in Manhattan. The two principal characters of the piece are Edie's father - a rich, glamorous and overbearing philanderer and formidable snob - and Warhol himself. She was his close companion, the superstar of his films, the victim of a life, saturated with drugs and sex, which he created for her. In 1971, at the age of 28, she died of an overdose of barbiturates.