You Don’t Own Me: The Life and Times of Lesley Gore

1963-tail fins were in, sock hops were hot, and a fairytale white knight was president. That summer, sixteen year-old singer Lesley Gore released her debut single, It’s My Party, propelling her to Number One on the charts. For the next several years, the crowned Princess of Pop dominated the radio with a string of hits including Judy’s Turn to Cry, She’s A Fool, Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows, and the rousing anthem for independence, You Don’t Own Me, making her the most successful and influential solo female artist of the 60s. But beneath the bubblegum facade was a girl squirming against social and professional pressures to simply be herself and to forge a future where she could write and perform music beyond the trappings of teenage angst and love triangles. Assembled over five years of research and interviews, this is the first and long overdue biography of Lesley Gore, one of pop music’s pioneering Mothers, which chronicles her meteoric rise to fame, her devastating fall from popularity and struggle for relevance in the 1970s, and her reemergence as a powerful songwriter, political activist, and camp icon. The biography includes behind-the-scenes stories about the making of her hit records, debunks or clarifies popular myths about her career, and places her remarkable life and times within a historical context to reveal how her music was both impacted by, and contributed to, each decade of her astounding fifty-year career.