Unflinching in its honesty, Wohl’s memoir provides a disquieting glimpse into one family in America’s privileged class, a family made worthy of examination because one of its members — whose presence lives on luminously in her films — remains a source of fascination more than 50 years after her death ... sensitive, elegantly written.
Beautiful, if not exactly joyful ... Wohl adds sensitive shading and texture to the group portrait of the Sedgwicks that emerged in Edie — and a spray of light ... As It Turns Out affords opportunity for Wohl, with the perspective of decades, to walk back some of the comments she made to Stein about [Warhol], to acknowledge his creative and emotional breadth and his prescience ... Wohl has maintained what seems a cool remove from this difficult sister, learning her precise birth date from a 2015 Vogue article and expressing surprise that the magazine was still celebrating Edie. A few of her passages land as stubbornly, perhaps self-protectively, naïve.
Wohl’s book is not a recollection or a mere revision but rather an attempt to understand the intense attention, even obsession, with Edie and Andy, and how their pairing anticipated the age of the influencer ... A phenomenon is unknowable, perhaps.
