"The Blonde"

Anna Godbersen, author of The Blonde, is the New York Times bestselling author of The Luxe and Bright Young Things. She grew up in Berkeley, California, graduated from Barnard College, and lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

Godbersen applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Blonde, and reported the following:

I am pleased to report that not only is page 69 representative of the rest of The Blonde, but it is also thematically on point for this particular test, as it is rather suggestive. It's the first page of a chapter, and begins with a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe -- a version that emphasizes her shrewdness and will over her drug use and victimization -- waiting in a car for a man she had been dancing with at a party. The man is another of the twentieth century's most famous people (I'm not going to say which one, mostly because I don't think anybody is going to have any trouble guessing!), and she hears him whistling a jazz standard as he approaches along a darkened street. As she waits she cycles through anticipation, calculation, fear and desire, which is true to the novel as a whole -- even in a plot that is pretty wild in places, I always wanted the reader to be close to the fury, and variety, of her emotional life. I wanted her, and the man she is about to seduce (for reasons too complicated to explain here), to read like messy, flesh and blood human beings, and very much alive. Anyway, he gets in her car, and they stare at each other, and their breathing gets kind of intense, and -- I'm going to have to leave it there. The real action is on pages 70-71, I'm afraid.

© 2014 Anna Godbersen, author of The Blonde

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