City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

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


City of girls is a lifestory of Vivian Morris, a woman in her nineties, told in a letter to a younger woman Angela, whose connection to Vivian we do not discover until almost the end of the book. Vivian came from a well-off family. I really enjoyed the description of Vivian’s year at Vassar where she managed to fail every single class mainly due to a total lack of interest. Vivian was then sent to New York City to live with her Aunt Peg, an owner of theatre. In her own words, Vivian was good at two things in her life: sewing and sex. The first skill she puts to work designing and making costumes for the plays in Aunt Peg’s theatre. The second, well, there was plenty of that too, as 19 year-old Vivian throws herself into a life full of parties with other showgirls and all sorts of men.

In her preface Elizabeth Gilbert said that she wanted “to write a novel about promiscuous girls whose lives are not destroyed by their sexual desires.” Looking back at those years (the first part of the book is set in early 1940s with the WWII going on), Vivian reflects: ‘I might have realized that some of the fun young men with whom I was cavorting every night in New York City were just the right age to be put on the front lines when America inevitably did enter this war. If I'd known then what I know now - namely: that so many of those beautiful young boys would soon be lost to the battlefields of Europe or to the infernos of the South Pacific - I would have had sex with even more of them’.

I cannot deny that Vivian is not always a likeable character, she is way too self-absorbed for that, but there is a special energy and vitality about her that makes you want to continue reading this book in order to find out how this coming-of-age story is going to turn out. The later parts are not as colourful and full of joie de vivre, which is only natural, as they deal with a more mature Vivian.

An engaging book set in an interesting period of time and full of well-developed colourful characters.

Thank you to Edelweiss and Riverhead Books (Penguin Publishing Group) for the ARC provided in exchange for an honest opinion.


Title: City of Girls
Authour: Elizabeth Gilbert
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Expected Date: 4th of June 2019