100 Books Like Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper

There’s so much texture on this cover, and the Renoir painting stands out because it’s probably the most recognizable part. The story involves Irene Cahen d’Anvers, the woman who sat for Renoir as a young girl, and how she came from a prominent Jewish family in France. Irene made some pivotal decisions that would forever change the lives of her ex-husband and daughter.

I have to say that I do sometimes judge a book by its cover and this one blew me away. I could already tell it would be a fun account of women in 1920s Cairo. I loved learning about the positions in society these divas held at a time when women around the world were just starting to get some rights—maybe. 

This cover completely drew me in because the typewriter, cityscape, and WWII airplanes all show an urgency and a story just waiting to be told. Cohen writes about prominent WWII foreign correspondents, including Dorothy Thompson and Frances Fineman, who travel the world in search of the latest war update. It was certainly not as easy to get from country to country back then—especially across vast oceans—so I really appreciated their determination to travel. 

Marc Chagall is a household name to arts aficionados, but his daughter Ida was also renowned in the Paris art world before World War II. This lovely novel tells of the overbearing way Chagall treated Ida and how he viewed her more as an assistant than a daughter. And when she married, he painted “The Wedding Chair” as a gift to her, which represented his anger at her leaving. This novel helped bring about a new trend to recount the untold stories of women alongside—or even in front of—famous men.

This murder mystery novel is one that really stayed with me. It has a noir quality that fits the 1940s era, and a realistic depiction of the difficulties of employment at various levels in Hollywood. Suspicion falls on the protagonist when her roommate turns up dead on the set of a Barbara Stanwyck film, and through the course of the novel various scandals, mysteries, and cover-ups collide. Though the main character isn’t herself a star, far from it, she offers a particular perspective on the stars she knows and the industry as a whole. Stanwyck is one of Hollywood’s great talents and true survivors, as forceful on the page and as desperate to salvage her personal life as any of her movie characters.

Like many Irish women, my mother and grandmother were obsessed with movie star Grace Kelly (who became Princess Grace of Monaco in 1956) and passed on that fascination to me.

I have long thought that important public women of Irish America such as Jackie Kennedy and Grace have not been given due consideration in surveys of Irish America, which tend to emphasize public men. Therefore, I love the biography, High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly, because it takes its glamorous subject seriously.

Spoto’s book goes beyond biographers’ usual emphasis on the glitter of Grace’s rise to princess to provide an intimate, respectful, and sympathetic portrait of the woman, the actor, the mother, the wife, and the very able representative of a small principality on the world stage.

Many assume that the Philadelphia-born Kelly was elite, but Spoto lays out that she was the granddaughter of a poor Mayo man… show more.

Barbra Streisand reads her autobiography out loud for the audiobook. It takes 48 hours and covers her early years, her films, her albums, her politics, and her love life, and when it finished, I was bereft. What a woman! She was prolific and clever and often underestimated or put down, particularly in her early years, because she was a woman.

I said aloud, “Yes, Barbra!” when she triumphed over adversity (or sexism). She’s a phenomenal woman. However, she hates giving presentations and speeches and ties herself in knots at the thought. It’s reassuring that even a global superstar like Barbra has the same fear of presenting as so many of us. But she did something about it–she practiced and got better. And so can we.

McClintick makes the Hollywood boardroom scandal that began with David Begelman’s forgery of Cliff Robertson’s name on a $10,000 check, into a compulsively readable account of power run amok amongst  Hollywood-Wall Street executives. An expose of theft, cover-up, and blackmail, it is also a beautifully written, incisive portrait of men and women seduced by the glamor and power of Hollywood fame.

The Secret Conversations is a unique and intimate look into the life of legendary Hollywood actress, Ava Gardner. While writing my own book, this book helped me dive deeper into the head of a character like Rebekah Harkness. Similar to Rebekah (and our girl Tay), Ava was a tabloid darling who set out to live her best life. Fun Facts: Ava once married (and divorced) Frank Sinatra and eventually served as inspiration behind Taylor Jenkins Reid’s protagonist in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. During a GQ interview, Taylor Swift explained how The Secret Conversations inspired the concept for her "Wildest Dreams" music video.

This novel sparked my lifetime obsession regarding Mexican Revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa and the U.S. Army’s eventual pursuit of Villa deep into Mexico following his presumed attack on Columbus, New Mexico.

In some ways evoking aspects of Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, this is a blood and thunder coming-of-age novel set against a wartime backdrop and narrated by a young (and future silent movie cowboy star) Tom Mix, who on a romantic whim, decides to cross the border and fight with Villa to overthrow Mexico’s despotic president.

I believe I reread this novel perhaps six times within a year of its 1982 release. Irving also knows something about effectively mixing fact and fiction as the convicted (and incarcerated) author of the notoriously fake Autobiography of Howard Hughes.