I read it in the mid-1990s; not sure how old it was then. May not have been set in the same year it was published, but it probably takes place in the 80s, given some details. College setting, multiple POV characters. Three girls are a mini-clique. One of them was raped as a teenager: she was home alone and the rapist came in through the unlocked patio door. As a result, she's bulimic. She ends her binges with ice cream, because that makes it easier to start vomiting. Also, when she wants to have a crying session, she listens to "An Innocent Man" by Billy Joel. Another girl has a brother who died in Vietnam; she visits the Vietnam Memorial in DC and does a rubbing of his name. I forget what the third girl's story was. One of them gets arrested for DUI, and claims that she was only driving to get away from a guy who was trying to rape her. The bulimic girl bails her out and gives the police what-for for spending more time on the DUI than the rape attempt. A lot of it had to do with sexuality and finding out who they are: truly gay or just experimenting? We also get the POV of a fourth girl, not in their group, who is more of a girly-girl than the others and has a boyfriend who is rather condescending (makes her sit on his lap while he mansplains to her). Her mother recently came out as gay and is living with another woman. When she spends the weekend with mom and mom's GF, she has a moment alone with mom and sputters "How...how..." Mom cuts her off, "I can't explain it to you." I think this girl's name was Susan; at the end, one of the other girls says "[name], you aren't worth mentioning," and IIRC, it was "Susan, you aren't worth mentioning." Couple more details: Someone hosts Afternoon Tea every Friday, and anyone who attends has to wear a hat. Susan, or whatever her name is, is said to take Cosmo advice very seriously. She and some of the other are on the staff of either the newspaper or the lit mag. I tried a search, here and elsewhere, but I had even less luck searching for "Beautiful Girls" than I did with "The Edge"! And there's a tiny chance that's not the title. But I'm sure that it had "Girls" in the title. And it's because of the Vietnam Memorial and the Billy Joel album that I think it was set, even if not published, in the early-to-mid 1980s; the Memorial was opened in 1982, the album was released in 1983, and these are both presented as being fairly new.
They don’t call themselves pretty girls but Amazons—these three young women at the University of North Carolina. Alexandria, Penelope, and Caroline are too tall, too smart, too striking, and too uncertain to be standard “pretty girls.” But as they struggle through a critical semester in their lives, pretty girls is often what they want to be. Garrett Weyr's Pretty Girls is They don’t call themselves pretty girls but Amazons—these three young women at the University of North Carolina. Alexandria, Penelope, and Caroline are too tall, too smart, too striking, and too uncertain to be standard “pretty girls.” But as they struggle through a critical semester in their lives, pretty girls is often what they want to be. Garrett Weyr's Pretty Girls is the story of how the Amazons grow together and grow apart, fall in and out of love, and try to figure out what it means today to be a woman.Penelope, the daughter of the American ambassador to France, is brash, stylish, highly critical, very European, and very vulnerable. Her best friend, Alex, is a New York native with a snappy comeback for every situation; she is constantly dieting, as if to purge herself of the harsh secret she’ll tell no one, not even the other Amazons. Caroline, who loves both her friends more than she loves herself, is haunted by the memory of the man who left her and by the death of her much older brother in Vietnam.Starting with their arrival in Chapel Hill in late August, through tea parties, first dates, football games, mid-term forays off campus, and bull sessions in “the Pit,” events threaten to erode the bond among the Amazons. All three are emotionally involved with a man named Edward who is almost as smart as they are, but not smart enough to like an Amazon as much as he likes Susan, a sorority princess. But Susan is not what she seems; just as the Amazons sometimes long to be pretty girls, a pretty girl like Susan can long to be an Amazon.From simple jealousies to a failed romance, bulimia, sexual violence, an unwanted pregnancy, and even suicide, Alex, Caroline, and Penelope suddenly confront overwhelmingly adult problems. By Thanksgiving, they are not just pretty girls, not just Amazons, but women with a measure of earned pain and experience.Pretty Girls, Garrett Weyr’s funny and moving first novel, is a chronicle of young women who have grown up taking feminist values for granted—only to enter into a lifelong struggle to accept themselves and make a precise place for themselves in the world. It is an impressive debut. ...more