Beautiful Garbage: A Novel

by Jill Di Donato

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938314070
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	07/30/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	680 KB

About the Author

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

Editorial Reviews

An alluring story of New York nightlife and its seedy players.”
—Cat Marnell, VICE columnist

“Equal parts Patti Smith’s Just Kids and The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Beautiful Garbage is a voyeuristic panorama of the vice and vanity of the downtown art scene in the 1980s.”
—Ivy Pochoda, author of The Art of Disappearing and Visitation Street

“Beautiful Garbage offers up one woman’s tour of duty of a New York City consumed by art, sex, and ambition. By turns passionate, cruel, shocking, and engrossing, this is a novel steeped in the lure of glamour and transformation the Big Apple’s always had to offer.”
—Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of Women in Lust and Fast Girls

“Beautiful, yes. Garbage, no. Just a captivating story of art, women, friendship, drugs, and self-destruction set against the glittery backdrop of a vanished Manhattan.”
—Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia

“Beautiful Garbage combines the page-turning ease of a beach read with a polished and ambitious literary tone. As challenging and unconventional as its heroine, Jodi Plum, the book falls into a heritage that includes Plath and Edie Sedgwick, and yet is freshly and con dently dependent on neither.”
—Ruth Fowler, author of Girl, Undressed

“We have all heard the phrase ‘one man's garbage is another's treasure.’ Beautiful Garbage happens to be everyone’s treasure. To read this book is to listen to that gritty voice in your own head that keeps repeating, DO IT.”
—Jules Kim, Creator and Owner of Bijules Jewelry

From the Publisher