BROADCASTS.com

b'

Billy Ikehorn-Orsini is IT.\\xa0 Extraordinary wealthy, profoundly chic, and her diamonds have names.\\xa0 Valentine is the next big couture designer.\\xa0 Spider is a photographer who somehow now is the guy who makes a store cool.\\xa0 Whatever, just go with it - together they are the minds behind Scruples, the\\xa0 boutique that sounds suspiciously like a Cracker Barrel that put Rodeo Drive on the map for women like your mom and your aunties and your grandma who read this book in 1978!\\xa0 It\'s Scruples\\xa0by Judith Krantz!

There\'s a serious warning about this one. This is the most upsetting depiction of disordered eating that I\'ve ever seen presented as aspirational in a mainstream book. This book almost certainly has a body count; it depicts an "awakening" in France with a specific calorie count, it makes anorexia sound extremely chic and liberating, it fetishizes iron control of food intake as much as it fetishizes women\'s clothing.\\xa0 If you\'re sensitive to this, do not read this book.\\xa0 If you can handle plenty of fat shaming and overvaluing of thinness but not the part of the book that\'s a literal\\xa0DIY guide for acquiring an eating disorder, then when Billy goes to France skip until she comes back to the US.\\xa0 If you don\'t want to even hear discussion of it, we completely understand - don\'t listen to this episode, we\'ll catch you next time.\\xa0\\xa0

It also has everything else you\'re imagining in a 1978 trashy airport book (except, surprisingly, sexual assault) - it uses a lot of awful slurs, it has this whiplash attitude towards gay men and women back and forth between genuine familiarity and ugly sterotype, in an otherwise sexy scene it calls a man\'s testicles\\xa0paunchy globes\\xa0- it\'s a whole thing. This book is\\xa0a lot\\xa0and a lot of it is troubling - but a lot of it\'s amazing, it\'s an experience!