''Randa, what's wrong with you?''

''Nothing. I mean, I'm a crazy cocaine addict with a hankering for heroin, but other than that, I'm just a nice Jewish girl from the Upper East Side with Prada shoes. How could anything be wrong?''


Molly Jong-Fast's Normal Girl is striking-and as funny as it as real. Inspired by her own experiences growing up in the decadent, fast-paced netherworld of New York City's jet set, Jong-Fast's debut novel is a hilarious, hard-edged walk past the velvet rope.


At just nineteen, Miranda Woke seems to have it all. Her parents are famous socialites, she's already been written up on Page Six sixteen times, she's on all the right invitation lists, and drugs and alcohol are never in short supply. But while her image screams ''It girl,'' she'd rather be a normal girl, and the A-list feels even more uncomfortable than her Manolo Blahnik shoes. In fact, she's become the ''living embodiment of an awkward phase'' with ''more issues than Harper's Bazaar.'' Neither Xanax nor Deepak Chopra tapes help. And now that her junkie party has trashed her parents' house, she has to liquidate her trust fund to pay Mom's decorator for a quick fix. But worst of all, Miranda thinks she just murdered her own boyfriend.


In an all-too-glamorous world where the cell phone is always ringing, Miranda sees no escape other than a downward spiral of cocaine, Valium, and heroin. It takes friends who offer more than air kisses to force Miranda to look in the mirror and get some help.