She’s telling us her story as an old woman, and she looks back at her 19-year-old self with refreshingly clear-eyed affection. And Vivian is a fantastic narrator, self-aware and funny and just cynical enough. Gilbert’s prose has an inject-it-into-my-veins immediacy: It’s not so lyrical that it calls attention to itself, but the rhythm of each sentence is so precise that you absorb it before you even realize what’s happening. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark But while Vivian finds the freedom and decadence of her new life exhilarating, she’s also becoming more and more selfish, and we can tell from the mounting tension of her narration that she’ll soon make a terrible mistake. Sharing a room above the theater with the most beautiful of all the showgirls, Vivian begins her glamorous New York City existence: making costumes for the shows during the day and partying with the dancers every night. They exist mostly as an excuse “for lovers to reunite and for dancers to show off their legs.” The Lily is peopled with down-on-their-luck artists and with the most beautiful showgirls in New York City, and Vivian - who thinks “there was never anything better than those simple, enthusiastic revues” that are “designed to make people happy” - believes she has found her people. Peg runs a dilapidated theater in Times Square called the Lily, where she puts on “working-class entertainment for working-class people”: hack musicals thrown together in a matter of days. Vivian is wealthy and WASPy and sheltered, but when she moves in with her Aunt Peg, worlds open before her. Turning its pages, you can almost smell the warm cement sidewalks and the chlorine.Ĭity of Girls is the story of Vivian Morris, who comes to New York City in 1940 as a 19-year-old Vassar dropout. You don’t read it so much as sink luxuriously into it, like you’re diving into a clean and icy cold swimming pool on a hot day. City of Girls, from Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, is the Platonic ideal of a summer book.

Books by elizabeth gilbert