Education

Ruth Liebmann attended Radcliffe College.

Career

When Ruth Liebmann published her first novel, Satisfaction, under the pseudonym Rae Lawrence, she also created a fictitious life for her literary alter ego in an article that ran in the New York Times. According to this piece, Lawrence was a New Jersey secretary who overcame the obstacles of the publishing world to make it big with her first book. Liebmann was soon outed as the real author, her literature major from Radcliffe and background in publishing revealed. She worked as an assistant editor at Viking Penguin Press and was a bookseller at Shakespeare & Co.

Satisfaction is a beach book, a genre described by Los Angeles Times book reviewer Karen Stabiner as "stories that rev at higher r.p.m.s in settings that are even more outlandish than usual." Four Radcliffe freshmen, all daughters of famous men, make up the cast of Satisfaction. Rosaline, the sheltered sweet rich girl; Marinda, the dark, insecure ethnic binge eater; Katie Lee, the conniving Southerner; and December, the free spirit with the horrible secret. Rosaline marries first, wedding a wealthy social-register type like herself. Marinda, whose family has organized crime ties, engages in various complicated relationships, including one with a drug addict. Katie Lee, an heir to a Hiltonesque dynasty, becomes a successful though scheming businesswoman. And December uses her beauty to achieve supermodel status and Hollywood starlet fame. Having little in common other than their school tie, the women's lives remain connected by their love for Schuyler Smith, a Montana-born writer they met when he was a student at Harvard and with whom each has had a relationship over the years. One marries him at the book's outset, and the rest of the novel flashes back over the women's lives to reveal the lucky bride.

Chicago Tribune book reviewer Roger Davis Friedman cites Ruth Liebman's literary precursors as Harold Robbins, Judith Krantz, and Jacqueline Susann. In fact, Susann's literary manager and agent contacted Liebman's editor about her completing the rough draft Susann had written of a sequel to her 1966 bestseller Valley of the Dolls. Liebman took the two-hundred-page manuscript and spent two years turning it into Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls: A Novel. When discussing the process in an interview on Randornhouse.com, Liebman said, "The main characters -Anne, Neely, and Lyon - are one hundred percent Jackie's. And the big question that drives the plot is from her draft too. In order to make the story contemporary, I had to add things that didn't exist in Jackie's day." The three main characters - model Anne Wells; her husband, director Lyon Burke; and singer Neely O'Hara - last seen in the late 1960s, are reintroduced in the late 1980s but have aged only ten years. Booklist reviewer Ilene Cooper felt that one of the problems with the sequel is that attitudes and actions that were once shocking in the 1960s, when the original was published, "just seem silly here." However, Cooper allowed that Liebman does a great job of imitating Sussan's style, and "the flow of dialogue still turns the pages."

Ruth Liebmann began her career at Random House publishing house in 1995 as a New York City sales representative. She represented Random House to independent booksellers, the American Booksellers Association, Book Sense, and the regional booksellers' associations. She also managed the house's New York metro district managers and NAMR (national account marketing representative), acting as a divisional director. In 2006, she was promoted to vice-president and director of retail field marketing and merchandising.

Achievements

• Ruth Liebmann's novel "Satisfaction" became a bestseller. She has a prolific career in the publishing business.

Works

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  • Satisfaction

    (Four women searching for happiness and wealth - Katie Lee...)

    1987
  • Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls

    (Valley of the Dolls was sexy, shocking, and unrelenting i...)

    2001