AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! 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.
"A spellbinding novel about love freedom and finding your own happiness." - PopSugar
"Intimate and richly sensual razzle-dazzle with a hint of danger." - USA Today "Pairs well
with a cocktail...or two." - TheSkimm "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.
