In June 1931, the battered body of a stunningly beautiful girl-about-town with the unlikely name of Starr Faithfull washed up on a New York beach. She was twenty-five years old when she died, and had lived with her family on fashionable St. Luke's Place in Greenwich Village, three doors away from the home of Mayor Jimmy Walker.
The tabloids had a field day: Had Starr been murdered? Had she fallen overboard during a bon voyage party on the Cunard liner then heading out to sea? Had she committed suicide?
Sensation turned to scandal when, in the course of their investigations, the police discovered Starr's "Memory Book," a diary containing passages of eroticism that even the tabloids did not dare to print - and, starting when Starr was eleven years old, the initials AJP, which proved to belong to Andrew J. Peters, Starr's rich and aristocratic cousin, a former mayor of Boston who was more than thirty years her senior.
Now, penetrating with extraordinary sensitivity the mind of the young Starr and the woman she became, Gloria Vanderbilt creates her own version of the lost Memory Book, offering us her own truths about the love between the child and the man, and her own resolution of the enduring mysteries surrounding Starr's life and death. Deepfelt, erotic, tragic - here is a novel that will be read compulsively and will linger in the mind.