Bette Midler "Isn't She Great" and "Drowning Mona". In Andrew Bergman's "Isn't She Great", a highly fictionalized account of the life and career of author Jacqueline Susann, she played alongside Nathan Lane and Stockard Channing, portraying Susann with her early struggles as an aspiring actress relentlessly hungry for fame, her relationship with press agent Irving Mansfield, her success as the author of "Valley of the Dolls", and her battle with and subsequent death from breast cancer. The dramedy garnered largely negative reviews by critics, who dismissed it as "bland material [that] produces entirely forgettable comic performances." For her performance in the film,
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