Diary of a South Beach Party Girl - by Gwen Cooper (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

South Beach in the late 1990s is a town of blink-and-you'll-miss-'em nightclubs populated by celebrities, models, mobsters, heiresses, drug dealers, drag queens, and fun seekers of all stripes. It's a place where the famous come to party like locals, the locals party like rock stars behind velvet ropes, and the press is savvy enough to know what not to report.

Rachel Baum is a sheltered, career-oriented everygirl when she moves to South Beach from her quiet Miami suburb, searching for a life less ordinary. Quickly making friends among SoBe's most exclusive scenesters, she spends her days building a career and her nights building a reputation. But in a town where friends become enemies faster than highs become hangovers, the life less ordinary turns into more than Rachel bargained for. As she pursues the endless party in penthouses, dive bars, after-hours clubs, and cocaine speakeasies, Rachel struggles to balance her goals and ambitions with the decadence and excess -- especially her drug-fueled, on-again off-again relationship with Yale-graduate-turned-addict John Hood -- that threaten to destroy everything she's always worked for.

With tremendous wit and razor-sharp insight, Diary of a South Beach Party Girl portrays the innermost sanctums of South Beach's privileged Beautiful People through the eyes of a no longer innocent heroine.

Review Quotes

"A dishy look at the SoBe scene." -- Harper's Bazaar

"A page-turner."

-- Playgirl

"As captivating as it is alarming."

-- Cosmopolitan

"Like a popular and generous best friend, Cooper takes readers behind the velvet rope and into the seedily thrilling, drug-filled world of late-90s Miami." -- People

"The biggest sensation since Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls is Gwen Cooper's Diary of a South Beach Party Girl." -- JumpOnMarksList.com

"There's real wit and pathos beneath the feather boas."

-- Entertainment Weekly

"300-plus pages of what Vanessa Williams' show South Beach should've looked like."

-- Jossip.com