- Published: 1 July 2015
- ISBN: 9780857985736
- Imprint: Random House Australia
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 320
After Perfect
A Daughter's Memoir
- Published: 1 July 2015
- ISBN: 9780857985736
- Imprint: Random House Australia
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 320
The film The Wolf of Wall Street is one of those Fieldingesque tales featuring picaresque rogues that, to many, is emblematic of the crass excess of the 1990s. Intended as a cautionary tale. To McDowell, daughter of Tom Prousalis (a business associate of the real wolf, Jordan Belfort, who went to jail for fraud), the film romanticised the con-men it depicted. This is the tale from the daughter's point of view. No loveable rogues, just duplicitous cheats who cause tremendous damage to their families and society. McDowell, who changed her name, charts her family's fall from grace (the sale of the family mansion and the holiday house on Nantucket Island, divorce), and her own from privilege to working in seedy bars, homelessness, bit acting, drink and drugs. It's a record of the personal cost of those years, but also documents her forgiveness of her father and her gritty determination to go forward.
Steven Carroll, The Sydney Morning Herald
A searing memoir of loss and redemption.
People magazine
{McDowell] has written a memoir about the fallout from her father's crimes, a tale of the American Dream upended.
The Village Voice, Fifteen Books You Need to Read in 2015
[A] buzzy book...McDowell lays bare the sad and sordid aftermath of her father's deserved downfall.
Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News
McDowell traces how her privileged family lost everything...and that was only the beginning of her nosedive.
O Magazine
[A] gritty, heart-wrenching memoir.
Parade.com
[Christina McDowell] exposes the side of ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ we didn’t get to see.
Metro US