City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert
127 Rating(s)
List: $25.00 | Sale: $18.00
Club: $12.50

City of Girls
A Novel

Bestseller

Narrator: Blair Brown

Unabridged: 15 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 06/04/2019


Synopsis

From the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and The Signature of All Things, a delicious novel of glamour, sex, and adventure, about a young woman discovering that you don't have to be a good girl to be a good person.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Oprah.com, Real Simple, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, GoodReads, PureWow, Vulture, The Millions and more.

"Life is both fleeting and dangerous, and there is no point in denying yourself pleasure, or being anything other than what you are."

Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love.

In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters, from the fun-chasing showgirls to a sexy male actor, a grand-dame actress, a lady-killer writer, and no-nonsense stage manager. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves - and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest.

Now eighty-nine years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life - and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it. "At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time," she muses. "After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is." Written with a powerful wisdom about human desire and connection, City of Girls is a love story like no other.

Author Bio

If you have ever seen the movie Coyote Ugly, you have seen the adaptation of the article written by American author, Elizabeth Gilbert, for GQ Magazine, which described her experiences working as a bartender on the Lower East Side of New York City. Gilbert held many jobs after earning her degree in Political Science from New York University. All of her labor jobs gave her inspiration for her fictional books and magazine articles.

Elizabeth Gilbert had almost immediate success with her writing, but the pinnacle of success for her was her book Eat, Pray, Love, which was written after a very upsetting divorce and she took off on a healing adventure throughout the world. After her first book, which was a collection of short stories, Pilgrim, she was praised as a " young writer of incandescent talent". Eat, Pray, Love was translated into thirty languages, selling over 12 million copies. In 2010, Julia Robert's starred in a film adaptation of the movie.

Gilbert's latest books are Committed, The Signature of All Things, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, and City of Girls, about the NYC theater world of the 1940's. She lives in NYC, rural New Jersey, and anywhere else her adventures take her.

Reviews