I really like reading memoirs written by women; I particularly like it if their childhood had some of the same dismal features as mine. Some of my favorites? Susan Jane Gilman’s Hypocrite in a Poofy White Dress and Betsy Lerner’s Food and Loathing: a Life Measured Out in Calories.Free Gift With Purchase describes Jean Godfrey-June’s childhood in a family with remarkable similarities to mine. She writes “My mother is anti-glamour through and through: Physical appearances mean nothing to her.” My own mother is not quite as rigid as Jean’s mother, but the similarities are startling. My mother is a writer and an intellectual. She has never wore makeup other than a swipe of lipstick, as long as I can remember. For her, life was – and is – enlivened by a scintillating discussion of War and Peace. My parents gave their children a wonderful, intellectual brew to grow up in, a place where poems were read at supper. They didn’t give me a bottle of oil-free liquid foundation (which I would have adored) or even a stick of concealer (which I desperately needed). Such things were like Seventeen Magazine to my mother: incomprehensible and useless.

I went off to college having memorized – memorized! – the August Seventeen. I knew what I was supposed to look like at university (tall, slim, effortlessly beautiful in my autumnal cords), even if I wasn’t able to achieve it. Jean Godfrey-June went a step further. She chose to go to the University of Colorado because the return address for her Glamour subscription was Boulder, CO. She thought that the magazines must be located in Boulder, and she could instantly land an internship. Fascinating! Of course, she was disappointed. Magazines are located in New York City.

Never mind. She got through college, went to the city, and in a matter of a year or so became the top beauty editor of Elle. This is where the book really gets fun. Not only does she have access to all the beauty products one could possibly want, she gets a clothes allowance! She goes to Paris for the fashion shows. She engages in wild back-stabbing fights at work. The back of this book promises to out-do The Devil Wears Prada, and there’s some truth to it – all the more fascinating because her inside look at the fashion industry is actually true. Jean quits Elle and moves to Lucky. I’d never heard of this magazine, frankly. But I bought one in her honor. It turned out to be a Magazine about Shopping, according to its masthead. I had to laugh.

My mother considers it akin to hell to have to enter a department store, and it sounds as if her mother is exactly the same. I started looking at my daughter with trepidation: obviously our children mold themselves into our precise opposites…take on the one career that their mother will never understand (fyi: my mother taught creative writing for years and flunked every romance-like manuscript submitted in class).

One final note: the book is full of tips! I love beauty tips. And I don’t have time to pour over the pages of Seventeen any more to discover what sort of lip gloss I ought to be wearing. After reading Free Gift with Purchase I bought a jell eyeliner and a bottle of tinted moisturizer. I wore both all around the Romance Writers of America convention last month, and I’m sure I looked much more glamorous than normally.

This is a great, witty, hysterically funny story of a life spent in fashion – I heartily recommend it.

-Eloisa