Book Review: The Purple Diaries

I read Joseph Egan’s The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational Hollywood Scandal of the 1930s, which oversells itself a bit in that subtitle, frankly; the newspapers may have written that Hollywood was shaking in its boots over the potential revelations in Mary Astor’s diaries, but it’s pretty clear from Egan’s telling (although he never says this explicitly, presumably so as not to undercut his own subtitle) that this was mostly newspaper puff.

I enjoyed reading this book - it’s fun and easy to read - but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you just really love 1930s Hollywood, because this is a shallow, gossipy treatment. A really good historical nonfiction book in my opinion should use its subject as a window onto the wider world of the time period, which The Purple Diaries doesn’t even try to do. It’s telling its story and it’s sticking with that, which is valid and entertaining while it lasts but not the kind of thing that sticks with you.

It did make me want to watch Mary Astor's film Dodsworth, though, so that's something.