Secrets of the Model Dorm

The model dorm was where the Agency stuck the new girls, fresh off the boat from the rough streets of Rio, Midwestern cow towns, and unpronounceable Eastern European countries. For $2000 a month, these six-foot tall, vain, cutthroat beauties had the privilege of sharing bunk beds in a ten-by-twelve bedroom in downtown Manhattan while they learned how to walk properly and survive on two calories a day. Secrets of the Model Dorm is the story of Heather Johnston, called up to the big city from the farm leagues of Miami and just eighteen years old when she arrives at the dorm. There she meets Kylie, an Australian who maintains both her figure and her buzz with a strict diet of Metamucil martinis, and the Ukrainian Svetlana, whose delicate nose often haemorrhages from too much cocaine. From shuttling between measurement sessions at the Agency and casting by day, to trawling Manhattan's hottest clubs at night, pursued by drooling investment bankers (and a handsome, thirty-something French nightclub mogul named Robert Du Croix), Heather grows up quickly - and ultimately decides if modelling is the fairytale ending she had always imagined.