AS IT TURNS OUT

A scholar and translator attempts to unravel the mystery of her sister Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971).

In a memoir addressed to her brother, who died in 1965, Wohl (b. 1931) recounts her attempt, over more than 50 years, to understand her sister Edie, who in the mid-1960s, burst onto Manhattan’s cultural scene, “a fantasy image of upper-class glamour,” as Andy Warhol’s companion and muse. “I’m trying to figure out exactly what happened when Edie got together with Andy,” writes the author. “I want to know what she had that I so totally failed to see, but that he saw and put to such effective use.” Their unabashed self-promotion, Wohl asserts, “led to the present that we are all living out”—dominated by selfies, influencers, and relentless seekers of instant celebrity. Wohl was the oldest of eight children; Edie was the seventh. They were privileged but also isolated, raised on a ranch and tyrannized by their parents’ “despotic” rules. At boarding school when Edie was a child, Wohl saw only glimpses of the girl she portrays as demanding, headstrong, and often spoiled. Unlike her siblings, Edie’s tantrums got her whatever she wanted, and the author partly blames the family’s insularity on Edie’s appeal. When she arrived in New York in 1964, she appeared transcendent: “beautiful, unattached, and eager for life. She was also unimaginably innocent because literally everything was new to her.” She was beautiful, to be sure, and so vain about her appearance that she spent hours putting on makeup. “Severely bulimic” and an addict, she already had spent months in psychiatric hospitals. Wohl is not just interested in examining Edie as a cultural icon; she also seeks to expose their family’s dark side: her father, mentally unstable, narcissistic, and philandering; her mother, devoted to protecting him even after Edie accused him of molesting her. One brother killed himself, and Wohl was estranged for years. Edie, it turns out, was not the family’s only victim.

An absorbing portrait of troubled lives.