Danielle Steel: Proving you can still be Eurotrash after 50..

I have a confession to make. Over the (ahem, much extended) holiday season I read my first Danielle Steel novel. The correct response is: I have way too much time on my hands and I am now vehemently afraid of the thesaurus function. Forcing my way through all 352 pages of The House, I spent my last days of vacation waiting for Sarah Anderson to find out (because of course, I already knew after the first 10 pages) that she is in fact capable of falling in love with her steve martin-esque architect after a bad relationship with some hunk, buying a 30,000 square foot palace in San Francisco that her great-grandmother and her dead client lived in using her dead client's money she just happened to inherit, meeting a rich guy in Paris for inspirational prophecy and great wine, having a kid by accident and getting married - all at the age of 40. This is what a cold-blast in Florida induces. But every time I put the book down I would hover over its landing spot to stare at the back cover picture of Ms. Steel standing in the middle of an ornate living room donning a black ball gown with decollete neckline, hair pulled back immaculately.

I began to realize... this chick is eurotrash. I mean, she is always photographed wearing pearls or some obese necklace and jingly jangles (as my mom likes to call an excess of bracelets). Her tan is perma and her hair is sadly, longer than mine. It's as if she's managed to retain only the good parts of that Valley-of-the-dolls-meets-Joan-Collins look. And her life, well, if you think her books are outlandishly predictable, wait until you read her bio! Married five times, Steel is a recluse living in a 55-room home in San Francisco (sounds vaguely familiar...), early childhood spent in Paris with wealthy parents who taught her the joi de vivre which now demands she own a vacation home near St. Tropez, etc., etc. For Steel, art is the ultimate imitation of life. Damn, she is my kind of girl.

So I've sandwiched her in between Diane von Furstenberg and Donatella Versace in my style rolodex. Look at it this way: what author (of a book that is ostensibly NOT about fashion) goes into painstaking detail about her character's vintage Valentino dress find for an entire paragraph? And what author can trump her own book's front cover with her back cover head shot? She even has a fragrance and I swear, she is getting younger, like in an eerie Death Becomes Her sort of way. My advice? Add some of those gilded books to your library, they'll look perfect beside The Screwtape Letters and Bret Easton Ellis. I just did.