This HaBO is comes from Janine, who is looking for a potential women’s fiction:
The recent thread on cosmetic surgery made me think of this one–Googling got me nowhere so I am hoping for help!
I think this would have been women’s fiction a la Jackie Collins or Judith Krantz, rather than straight romance, and it most likely published before 2000.
It’s a female Count of Monte Cristo scenario!
The heroine is very wealthy and a nice person, but otherwise pretty ordinary in terms of looks and accomplishments–she’s never had to make an effort for anything due to her money. She thinks she has a great life and friends but in fact her fiance/husband and (I think) her best friend are conspiring behind her back to steal all her money.
Somewhere in this sequence of events, due to a botched hit/major accident while distraught/faking her death, everyone comes to think she is dead, and she ends up with a different and much more attractive face. She decides to go all the way with redoing herself, including more cosmetic surgery, and use her new identity for revenge on those who wronged her. The one specific detail I remember was that she wanted liposuction and the surgeon told her she had to lose weight through diet/exercise first, so she spent hours walking around Manhattan.
There was also a lot more makeover stuff, where she learns to style her hair, pick flattering clothes, etc. (I have no idea how she funded all of this). Naturally, the eventual revenge is satisfying!
I love a good revenge story with a heroine main character.
It’s Olivia Goldsmith’s Flavor of the Month!
Walking around Manhattan for hours to lose weight is the detail that stuck with me as well.
It’s about an actress, who was very talented but plain and overweight. Her fiance leaves her for a younger woman, she stops getting roles, and then her aunt (or grandmother?) dies, and the actress finds out the aunt had hoarded a ton of money in the walls (?) of her house. So the actress decides to use all this money to remake herself and go to LA to be a star. She does run into the ex-fiance, and I think she was planning on seducing him and then revealing the truth in a big gotcha?
I read it a long time ago, so I don’t remember most of the details, but it was bananas.
I don’t know if it’s the same one, but there was a tv miniseries in the mid-1980s called RETURN TO EDEN with this very plot line. I don’t know if it was based on a book, but the woman’s husband and best friend were in on it. The woman comes back from her “death” beautiful and unrecognizable; she gets together with her husband (he has no idea who she is) and he tells her very unflattering things about his dead wife (aka, her). I think the show might have been an Australian import because in my head I’m hearing the heroine speaking with an Australian accent. Also—and this is the crazy part—I think the woman “died” when her fiancé encouraged her to swim in a river where he knew there’d be crocodiles or alligators. Good luck finding this one!
Can’t believe I remembered so much about something g I haven’t seen or thought about in 35 years. My mind is full of pop-culture clutter, which might explain my inability to remember much of value—like where I put my keys!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Eden
Wow! Good luck with this cause the magical makeover is a meme in romantic fiction. (My favorite has always been Iris Johansen’s Ugly Duckling.) I suggest you check out Silver by Penny Jordan has a makeover as part of revenge plot.
Unrelated to the HaBO, a contribution to the closed thread on cosmetic surgery, since I hadn’t seen the thread before: In the second book of Stieg Larsson’s non-romance Millennium Trilogy, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” heroine Lisbeth Salander gets breast implants and it’s presented as a positive boost to her self-confidence. Relevant book excerpt here: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/books/excerpt-girl-who-played-with-fire.html
I also thought Flavor of the month, but not sure because there are (I think) multiple heroines’ stories blended in that and OP didn’t mention..
Oh my gosh, I think we (sort of) have it. I’m pretty sure reading this that my brain combined two books because of overlapping plot lines, and one of them was definitely Flavor of the Month. (Which, even if it’s wrong, sounds EXCELLENT and I have already ordered a copy from Amazon.)
If anyone can help with the other, I would be so appreciative. That one was the heiress whose SO betrays her to steal her money. I’m pretty sure it takes place entirely in a big East Coast city because the heroine gets in a car accident which was connected with the SO’s plot and it happened on a highway I was familiar with.(Maybe she found out and was running away/chasing them or maybe it was staged.) There may have been a coma + amnesia plot and there was definitely a makeover component, but it may have been more of a “mental makeover” as she builds a new life which is much more fulfilling than the old one. I think there was also a family lawyer who was suspicious of the SO and helped her out.
I think it is Iris Johansen The Ugly Duckling
I’m pretty sure that this is The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Fay Weldon (made into an interesting movie with Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr). Not a romance- not even close!- but definitely women’s fiction.
@ DiscoDollyDeb
Yes that was an Australian mini series – I had the same thought. The heroine is attacked by a croc, somehow survives, is rescued by an old prospector and he gives her a hunk of gold (? something valuable) to go to a plastic surgeon (love interest) and be made new and get on the cover of Vogue to attract her husbands interest and start her revenge.
I wonder if I can find it – I might have to watch it again.
Heh, this is a popular storyline. I remember a movie from the 70s called ‘The Girl Most Likely To’ starring Stockard Channing who was a homely girl who had been bullied/humiliated in college by various folks, got into a car accident and after the reconstructive surgery came out gorgeous. She took revenge on all the people who had been horrible to her. It was a dark comedy so some of the methods were kinda funny.
It’s definitely not related to the book(s) Janine is looking for, but all of this reminds of a bonkers Lifetime movie I saw in the ’90s (IMDb tells me it is A Face to Die For). Many similar elements including treacherous boyfriend/husband, facial reconstruction, and revenge. It’s like three different movies in one, though. There’s a psycho plastic surgeon who makes the heroine look like the dead wife he’s obsessed with in the middle of it all and the stuff with the husband is dropped completely for a long time, if I remember this right. It was all so very weird. If that sounds like fun to anyone, I think this might be on YouTube somewhere.
OMG. I actually fell down the rabbit hole earlier trying to figure out this book and ended up at Return to Eden as well. Because, get this, there is a Hindi movie version of that mini-series called Khoon Bhari Maang. Crocodiles, plastic surgery, the whole nine yards. I thought that maybe it was a Hindi version of an American made-for-TV movie and went searching. But I could’ve sworn there WAS an American TV movie based on a book that had this plot. And that only the heroine’s horse recognized her?
@Chanab – The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Fay Weldon was the first title that came to mind. The original British mini-series was far superior to the American film (although watching Meryl Streep’s character lust for Ed Begley, Jr.’s “Mr. Everyman” is, um… interesting in its own way). The American movie, “She-Devil” was directed by Susan Seidelman.
And @Tina, “The Girl Most Likely To…” was co-written by Joan Rivers, to whom my thoughts go often these days. At least once a week, I wish she was still with us so we could hear her commentary on what her former NYC neighbor has been doing to this country (& world) the last two years.
Sigh… Longer sigh…
Happy New Years, SBs.
This definitely seems to have been a common storyline in the ’70s! Another is The Promise. The plot’s too much to summarise but there’s class differences leading to an elopement, a disfiguring accident, the hero’s evil mother, a fake death, reconstructive surgery making the heroine unrecognisable, and so much more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promise_(1979_film)
I’ve never seen the film, but the novelisation of it was probably the first adult romance I read. I picked it up at a church bazaar. I didn’t realise until years later that it was written by Danielle Steel! It was her first published novel.
@Katie
I thoroughly enjoyed that movie. There is ANOTHER Lifetime movie I love called A Face to Kill For which is about a woman who is sent to prison by her treacherous husband, ends up having plastic surgery, and comes back as some hot shot Wall Street type person to get revenge on her ex.
@Jordan
I think I saw that one too! But the similarity to A Face to Die For made me kind of combine them in my head and forget there were two different movies. The other one was easier to track down because I remembered Yasmine Bleeth being in it. This plot seems to have been very popular for a long time.
Just an FYI, but I feel like there is a subplot in Flavor… that would read insensitive today (provided I recall correctly) regarding an intersex ( or trans? Argh, Memory!) character. I know it’s a Goldsmith book… the 3 women end up as actresses on the same show and the one I am referring to is a Hollywood scion.
@QOTU: Thank you for the heads up. My awareness and education is always evolving, and I sometimes (Argh, my Memory, too!) blank on which books have scenes that might be painful today. I feel terrible when that happens, so thank you. I appreciate the warning.