But, of course, what I didn't understand at 13 — or, to be more precise, I understood in the wrong way — was the pain Edie was in, the emotional instability from which she suffered: bouts of anorexia, two brothers lost to suicide, shock treatments. And her dark addictions — those famous racooned eyes pinned from amphetamines, then cocaine. Eventually, she found heroin. As Vogue editor Diana Vreeland said, "Edie was after life, and sometimes life doesn't come fast enough."
And death came: In 1971, at age 28, Edie died from "acute barbiturate intoxication."
"Everything I did was really underneath, I guess, motivated by psychological disturbances," Edie confided in audiotapes recorded for her movie Ciao! Manhattan not long before her death. She describes how her trademark look was her way of making "a mask out of my face. I practically destroyed it." She cut off her hair, stripped it silver, doing anything she could to change herself.
Edie herself was pained by the very aspects of her I found so glorious — but that fact was lost on me. Her self-awareness was part of her glamour; her madness felt exciting. Her descent felt dramatic, the stuff of grand tragedy. Now, as an adult, it seems unbearably sad.
At 16, I first visited New York City. Wearing my Edie t-shirt and my long earrings, I sought out the site of Warhol's famous Factory. Standing in front of the building, I had a moment of feeling like I was a part of it, that world. Her world.
Somehow it seems fitting that I would realize, a decade later, after New York became my permanent home, that I'd stood in front of the wrong building. It hadn't been right at all.
Megan Abbott's next novel, Fever, will be released in June. Her latest novel, Dare Me, is now out in paperback.