Aubrey Plaza And Bella Hadid Both Love This Cheeky Classic Book

Aubrey Plaza and Bella Hadid live in totally different corners of cool. They've built their personas on opposite ends of the It-girl spectrum — one sardonic, as a deadpan Hollywood misfit, and the other sultry, as a model with a million-dollar face. But the two have proved they're on the same page with this one sly, subversive cult classic.

"Valley of the Dolls," Jacqueline Susann's glitzy tale of fame and pharmaceuticals, has resurfaced as the thinking It-girl's guilty pleasure. Bella gave it her stamp of approval with an Instagram story to her millions of followers. Plaza, true to form, took a more chaotic route, casually telling Elle she stole it from the library and never gave it back. Both women saw something in its cocktail of desire and decay, beauty and breakdown, spotlights and sedatives.

For a book once written off as pulp, "Valley of the Dolls" is hard to shake. Anne, Neely, and Jennifer arrive in post-war New York chasing very different dreams, but they all get pulled into the same glittering mess. Anne wants out of a dead-end marriage and lands a job at a talent agency, telling herself she's just a secretary, until the cocktail parties and cashmere coats start to shift her thinking. Neely is seventeen and entirely allergic to subtlety. She's loud, hungry, and hellbent on being a star. Jennifer is older, softer in her delivery, but no less calculating. She fakes her age, sells her body, and wires money home to keep her mother quiet. Their paths cross, splinter, and spiral, but in the end, they all wind up with pills in their handbag. Fame may come and go, but the dolls — those devilish little pills that promise rest and relief — always show up right on cue.

A closer look at the bookshelves of Aubrey Plaza and Bella Hadid suggests Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" (which most certainly could be among the classic novels to pick for your next book club read) wasn't just a one-off. If anything, it's the anchor point in a wider, weirder reading pattern: a fascination with women who come undone, but do so in a highly aestheticized style.

Hadid has also shared support for "My Year of Rest and Relaxation," where Ottessa Moshfegh's dead-eyed heroine drugs herself into oblivion in a Manhattan apartment full of inherited money and curated apathy. Plaza, unsurprisingly, goes for "The Bell Jar," which traces a woman's ultimate descent into madness, wrapped in perfectionism and social suffocation. She shared with Elle that she can recognize herself in Plath's work, and it "makes [her] feel seen."

Even the stars' offbeat picks track. Plaza has shouted out "Liarmouth" by John Waters — a full-tilt satire about a scammer in freewheeling descent. Hadid's inclusion of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" might seem gentler, but Holly Golightly is all performance, too — a woman vanishing behind charm, always halfway out the door. Collectively, these are all stories about women spinning out, numbing up, or slipping away by choice, weighed down by socially scripted femininity. As Plaza and Hadid will attest, "Valley of the Dolls" understood that instinct long ago. Perhaps the pair should co-found a celebrity book club of their own.