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,
What a Carve Up! (novel) employing multiple narrative styles, different perspectives, movement between first- and third-person narrative voices and a highly fragmented timeline. Robert McCrum called it "the finest English satire from the 1980s - a memorable and explicit commentary on Thatcherism." In 2015, the author published a related novel set in the early 21st century, "Number 11". The latter novel is sometimes described as a sequel but elsewhere using other phrases such as a "sequel, of sorts." The relationship between the two books is suggested in the later novel (describing the relationship between two films, "What A Carve-Up!" and "What A Whopper", which are