Beautiful Garbage

If Holly Golightly lived in the ’80s, how far would she go to make a name for herself as Manhattan’s artist du jour? We know all about Warhol, Basquiat, Keith Haring, and their fictional counterparts, but what about the edgy women artists of this time?

Jodi Plum: smart, talented, ambitious, troubled. Fresh out of her teens, she leaves suburbia for Manhattan’s glam and gritty art scene, and almost immediately falls into the clutches of Monika, a beautiful photographer. With the help of her new mentor, Jodi quickly becomes a rising star—but when a skeleton from her past surfaces, her dream life crashes to a halt, and she slips into a world of parties, drugs, and high-class prostitution.

Set in the crime-plagued New York City of the 1980s, Beautiful Garbage parallels an artist’s journey with her sexual epiphanies, exploring the notorious milieu of the decade’s downtown art scene from the point of view of a young female artist—and offering a satirical and irreverent look at post-’70s sexual politics and the world of elite call girls.

A Brooklyn native, Jill Di Donato writes a sex column for The Huffington Post. This is her debut novel.