Cosmo magazine has a lot to answer for. The awesome amounts of hairspray I use to make my hair 80s big. Blacklight’s giggle fits every time we go to Stop & Shop…and the young Gwen snapping up … Palm Beach .

My excuse? I was thirteen and it was the novel excerpt in a Cosmo I had spirited home from the corner store and managed to smuggle up to my room without my mom seeing it. My mom wasn’t a wild one. Cosmo was hardcore porn to the mother who introduced me to the world of industrial strength undergarments when I was a very young teenager. Those Cosmo cover girls weren’t wearing Sears full length corset bras that left huge red marks for their double DDs.

So when I found the full novel Palm Beach at the library, oh yes I snapped it up and started reading it on the way home. (Okay… a) I don’t get carsick when I read as a passenger and b) tear a fresh book from me and lose your hand) I would have been better off taking the cover off and making paper dolls to reenact the whole Roxanne Pulitzer scandal. If you don’t know who Roxanne Pulitzer is? Google is your friend.

And let me tell you…I was beyond tempted to do the same last night when I pulled Palm Beach from my stacks of library books.

The only thing stopping me? First edition and IT’S A LIBRARY BOOK, I don’t have REPLACE A LIBRARY BOOK MONEY! Even with Amazon and Abe Books. Also? The husband has borrowed my good scissors and now they’re lost in the depths of his lair.

What makes Palm Beach so bad? The cheesy writing? The constant refrain of “conical tits”? Take your pick. And I am NOT joking about the conical tits. Lisa of the Conical Tits is going to put out someone’s eyes with those things.

Here’s the basic plot. White trash/goddess/hot babe Lisa Conical Tits attracts the attention of former hooker turned trophy wife Jo-Ann and the scion of the Kennedy Stansfield family, the blue eye hunk Bobby Stansfield. Will Cinderella Lisa win Bobby? Will Jo-Ann’s past come to haunt her? Will Lisa’s perfect conical titties ever sag? Yes. Yes. NEVER!

The best part of the book? The end! You know a book is tragically bad when the publisher has a contest (Win a Trip to Palm Beach) to even get you to pick it up at the bookstore.(Wonder who won that prize?) Don’t believe me? Hunt down the first edition hardcover.

If you must read a book about Palm Beach, try Roxanne Pulitzer’s tell all The Prize Pulitzer: The Roxanne Pulitzer Story.

Better yet, hunt down Charlotte Curtis’s The Rich and Other Atrocities and Charlotte Hays’s The Fortune Hunters: Dazzling Women and the Men They Married. Trust me. You do not need Lisa and her conical tits haunting your dreams. Charlotte Curtis was the real deal, read her instead.

As for Palm Beach? This book is already in the library return bag!