Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

Sasha Davis has everything a girl growing up in 1950s suburbia could want: beauty, intelligence and an all-star sports captain boyfriend. All she needs to succeed in life is to keep her skin clear and her intelligence hidden under her Prom Queen tiara. But when she drops out of college to marry, Sasha realises her life has become a fearful countdown to her thirtieth birthday - the year when her beauty will have faded entirely, and life as she knows it will end. As Sasha begins to rebel against her perfect, conservative upbringing, she finds herself experiencing an intellectual and sexual awakening that might be her only chance of outrunning the aging process. Alix Kates Shulman's landmark novel follows Sasha's coming of age through the sexual double standards, discrimination and harassment of the 1950s and 60s. Originally published in 1972, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen was the first great novel of second-wave feminism. Five decades later, it remains a funny, honest and heartbreakingly perceptive story of a young woman in a man's world.