Myra Breckinridge arrives in Hollywood with a plan for fame and a diary to record it in. Gore Vidal gives her every page of the novel, so the whole book runs in her voice: flattering, needling, and performing for an audience of one.

She takes a teaching post at an academy of drama and modeling, running classes in Empathy and Posture for students who want to be stars, and she works the job for everything it offers her. Leverage over the people around her. Gossip. An audience. Vidal uses her position to look at the film industry from the inside, and the glimpses of how studio power operates are candid and irreverent.

The satire aims at American machismo and patriarchy, at the business of manufacturing stars, and at the norms of gender and sexuality that the culture of 1968 treated as settled. Myra is a trans woman, and critics record the book as the first novel whose central character undergoes a clinical sex change. Dennis Altman placed it inside the wider cultural assault on those norms that ran through the late sixties and early seventies.

The register stays camp from the first entry, and Vidal wrote the book to provoke. It is frank about sex and unkind to almost everyone in it, so readers after a gentle comedy of manners should look elsewhere. The diary form keeps you inside Myra's verdict on every person she meets, and that voice carries the book.