Jell-O Girls. A Family History

In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's extended family bought the patent to Jell-O for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments. More than one hundred years later, Rowbottom's mother, Mary, began obsessively researching her family's past, determined to understand and combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse".
Before she died, Mary passed her research along to Rowbottom, in the hope that her daughter might someday write what she could not. Jell-O Girls is the liberation of that story. A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in its long shadow, Jell-O Girls is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love, and loss.