Once Is Not Enough is Jacqueline Susann's most overtly Freudian novel. In Valley of the Dolls (1966), Neely's mammoth insecurity is a result of her early deprivation of a mother and father but this is only one small facet of the book. In Once Is Not Enough, January Wayne's obsessive love of her father (her mother commits suicide when January is seven), her overblown Electra complex, is the center and soul of this fiction. January is not attracted to men of her own age.

Her first encounter is with a steamy Italian and her response is icy, in part because she is young, but mostly because she only loves her father. Later, after her father remarries Dee Granger, to January's extreme disap-pointment, January tries to fall in love with David Milford. She even makes love with him but it is a horrible experience and she withdraws from...