The Currency of Love

Starred review from May 22, 2017
This page-turning memoir of decadence and faith will resonate with seekers everywhere. While working as a struggling young model in Paris, Dodd met Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian businessman who had amassed a fortune. Caught up in a world of private jets, diamonds, and cocaine, she became one of Khashoggi’s “pleasure wives,” only to later learn that she’d been part of a carefully plotted scheme for a negotiated price: Dodd had been picked out of a notebook. Her walk through—and eventually away from—the dizzying world of extreme wealth and glamour includes her spiritual journey, which progresses as she learns more of her situation and eventually turns away from the lifestyle she has been forced into. Originally from Downey, Calif., Dodd was raised without religion, but she prayed to God as she navigated the instability of a modeling career and her life in a harem. As her search for faith intensified, she immersed herself in the world of psychics, hypnotherapists, and holy men until she realized it brought confusion, not peace. Scattered throughout the book are touching moments where she recalls being overcome with a sense of the divine providence of God; that guidance helps her find her way, even as questions linger. “I will never understand God,” Dodd concludes, “but will keep praying and meditating.”

May 15, 2017
A successful clothing designer reflects on her damaged upbringing and early years as a Paris-based fashion model.Using letters, journals, and "thousands of photos," Dodd reinvigorates her life as a struggling 1980s-era model. Though critical and cursory, an invaluable evaluation by Wilhelmina Models in 1979 opened a portal into the French modeling world, resulting in dispiriting culture shock and a hefty dose of disillusionment. Barely 20 years old at the time, the author writes of being whisked off to Paris, where an aloof agency booker dispatched her to endless dead-end "Go-Sees." Dodd eventually warmed up to the whirlwind of Parisian life and began booking photo shoots, magazine covers, and a dangerous series of social engagements with upscale businessmen, where her role was sketchy at best and she was sexually assaulted along with another model. Interspersed with the author's tales of her modeling career are details about her complicated, abusive Los Angeles upbringing at the hands of a sexually inappropriate father whom she both feared and worshipped and an "emotionally checked out" mother. As she climbed the international fashion industry's "slippery steep model ladder," Dodd's memories move briskly across fashion runways and photography shoots in Paris, London, Greece, and Spain. She fell into a troublesome and treacherous relationship with Adnan Khashoggi, a billionaire Middle Eastern arms dealer who promised Dodd the world but instead introduced her to cocaine and simply made her one in a harem of women at his disposal. Dodd writes earnestly and refreshingly about learning many of life's more difficult lessons the hard way, and while her recollections are narrowly focused to just a few years during the 1980s, readers still receive a generous sense of who she was back then and how her later degree in fashion merchandising provided the perfect transition from model to successful clothing designer. A breezy, impressively detailed glimpse into a beautiful young woman's self-discovery via the world of international fashion.

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May 15, 2017
It was a long road from adolescent liberation to genuine freedom for fashion icon Jill Dodd. Her quest for autonomy took her from California to Europe and beyond. Once a young girl escaping abuse, she became a top model featured in Vogue before, paradoxically, ending up in a wealthy man's harem. At five-nine and 123 pounds, she was almost too heavy for the famed Wilhelmina Agency, though she still managed to be sent to Paris at 20. Amid the loud colors, rustling skirts, and tight bodices of 1980s French couture, Dodd's rise was bumpy, marked by cocaine, little money, and sexual exploitation. A chance trip to Monte Carlo brought Adnan Khashoggi into her life. Soon she found herself living as a concubine with the billionaire Saudi arms dealer. For some, freedom is financial security. Dodd believed it should mean more. Her drive led her to found ROXY, a multimillion-dollar fashion brand. She now reflects on the quality of her independence and each turn that brought her to its realization in a remarkable story well worth reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)