Valley of the Dolls the Mount Everest of her dreams, only to find herself back in the valley of the dolls. Susann had apparently been thinking about the novel for some time. Some years earlier, she had begun "Underneath the Pancake", a show business novel, with her actress friend Beatrice Cole (c. 1910–1999). Later, she considered writing a novel about drug usage in show business to be called "The Pink Dolls". "Valley of the Dolls" is considered to be a "roman à clef", with its characters based on famous figures such as Judy Garland, Carole Landis, Dean Martin, and Ethel Merman. In 1973, after
Susann Cokal novel, "The Kingdom of Little Wounds", was published in fall 2013 by Candlewick Press and (in the UK and Australia) Walker Books. In the novel, women's bodies are the battlefields for court intrigue involving marriage and medicine during the Renaissance. The novel received glowing endorsements and reviews. Gregory Maguire, author of "Wicked" and other novels, wrote for the book's cover, “Brazen, baroque, "The Kingdom of Little Wounds" plots coordinates of history, fever, and magic in such a way that each is occasionally disguised as the other. However, there's no disguising Susann Cokal's immediate rise to eminence as a pantocrator of