***May 2011 Biography backlog time!***

You know how sometimes reading one book can get you to want to re-read another one?

For me, it was reading a Kay (Eloise) Thompson biography. Because it triggered the memory of another best selling series featuring a blonde girl turned into best selling doll and all the rage. Yet the two books act like the other never existed.

But in New York City, two bleached blondes of a certain age were creating young blonde alter egos who lived in a fantastic version of New York. While Eloise was laying waste to The Plaza, blocks away a little blonde named Edith was having adventures with her friends Mr Bear and Little Bear.

There’s something eerie and rather off when you track down The Lonely Doll books. Edith the doll is childish yet knowing. And most frightening of all, a clear doppelganger for her owner/creator Dare Wright.

Just how creepy? Get your hands on a copy of Jean Nathan’s The Secret Life of The Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright.

The hardcover edition will have a mosaic of pictures. The trade paperback will have what looks like a dead Barbie doll with seashells on her eyes and a rope of pearls. That’s Dare Wright, author, photographer, model, artist, eternal child.

You could sum up Dare Wright’s life as “totally freaking messed up”. That’s a very brief way of putting it. Just how very, truly messed up her life was not even her biographer could get to the bottom of. But after her parents’ bitter divorce, never seeing her father again, being separated from her beloved older brother for over twenty years and never never never out of her mother’s grasp certainly doesn’t make for a healthy and productive adult life.

Sure, Dare Wright wrote best selling books and was a successful model who could create of the illusion of luxury out of a gum wrapper and a toothpick. (Wonder what she would do with our dragon collection and Blacklight’s 500+ game collection?) But Dare Wright couldn’t form an adult relationship with a man, behaved like a small child well into her sixties and slept with her mother right up to her mother’s death.

When you put down The Secret Life of The Lonely Doll, you realize that Dare Wright was an illusion, a fantasy, a dream creature. Every artist works out their life and traumas in their art.

But not every artist leaves you as sad and drained as Dare Wright.