Lee Israel wants the mystery of Kilgallen's death to be revealed to his research, which is exhaustive in this long biography of a driven newspaper writer's career to the top and to the crashing ending in her fifties for reasons unknown. A portrait of the ambitious and driven to win at all costs personality of a young woman fortuitously born to a famous journalist writer who was instrumental in starting her career. Celebrity is not easy and the costs of notoriety are high; easy for KIlgallen to write about in others she could "skewer" but almost impossible to sustain in her precarious private life on any even keel. There is not one note of introspection in this story about Kilgallen; she apparently shared none and had a romanticism beyond normal bounds which helped her cope with any of life's exigencies. This makes for difficulty in assessing the woman, but certainly explains the heights of her career accomplishments. She basically fed the public's appetite for illusions of fame and fortune of the celebrated and the infamous in the 20th century.

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