She arrived in New York in 1964 with silver-painted legs, enormous eyes, and the peculiar glow of someone who had never been told they were ordinary. Within a year Andy Warhol had named her his superstar, and America had decided she was the face of a decade.
Nobody asked her if she wanted to be a face.
Edie Sedgwick was funny and strange and genuinely kind and so full of life it hurt to look at her directly. She danced at parties the way children dance — without self-consciousness, without performing. She cut her hair and every girl in New York cut hers. She wore chandelier earrings to breakfast and black tights that were really tights, not trousers, and nobody who ever met her forgot her.
"I feel everything too much," she said once. This is the truest thing anyone has said about her. She was not undone by cruelty or coldness. She was undone by excess feeling in a world that had no idea what to do with it.
The Factory used her. The cameras loved her. The parties consumed her. And through it all she kept dancing — right up until she couldn't.
She died in 1971 at twenty-eight. The cause was listed as an accidental barbiturate overdose. But what really happened is that she felt everything too much, for too long, in rooms full of people who were only watching.
She is the patron saint of girls who are too bright, too fast, too alive for the rooms they are put in. The ones the cameras cannot stop following. The ones nobody thinks to ask: are you alright?
I think about her when I am in the middle of creating something — when the work is going and the feeling is enormous and the world outside doesn't exist. I think: this is what she felt, right here. This exact aliveness.
She just never got to keep it.