Review | Book reviews: Enter Helen, This is Africa: a Dream Chaser’s Odyssey, and The Genius of Birds
Helen Gurley Brown: the woman behind the woman behind Sex and the City, the joy of fulfilling a lifelong travel dream, and food for thought on the intelligence of birds are this week’s non-fiction picks
Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman
by Brooke Hauser
HarperCollins (e-book)
3.5/5 stars
Let’s deal at the outset with the Hermès handbag in the room and say that Carrie Bradshaw is more the love child of Helen Gurley Brown than Candace Bushnell. But for Brown, former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, Sex and the City might never have existed, such was the impact of her epiphany that sex sells. The story of how an erstwhile advertising agency secretary came to take a sledgehammer to entrenched attitudes to mothers, wives and girlfriends, Brooke Hauser’s entertainingly honest biography doesn’t dodge the fact that Brown remains a divisive figure for feminists. Brown’s bestselling 1962 book, Sex and the Single Girl, declared that if sex outside marriage was proceeding then women had just as much right to it as men; she also believed that exploiting relationships with men for advancement was a skill, not a sin. Enter Helen, incidentally, is a stage direction from a planned musical about Brown’s life (so stop sniggering at the back), but as a double entendre it’s a neat nod to Brown’s realisation that she was a master trader in the most powerful currency of all. Few “mousy” types from Arkansas have climbed the greasy pole so successfully.