Review: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
It is the summer of 1940. Nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris arrives in New York with her suitcase and sewing machine, exiled by her despairing parents. Although her quicksilver talents with a needle and commitment to mastering the perfect hair roll have been deemed insufficient for her to pass into her sophomore year of Vassar, she soon finds gainful employment as the self-appointed seamstress at the Lily Playhouse, her unconventional Aunt Peg's charmingly disreputable Manhattan revue theatre. There, Vivian quickly becomes the toast of the showgirls, transforming the trash and tinsel only fit for the cheap seats into creations for goddesses.
Exile in New York is no exile at all: here in this strange wartime city of girls, Vivian and her girlfriends mean to drink the heady highball of life itself to the last drop. And when the legendary English actress Edna Watson comes to the Lily to star in the company's most ambitious show ever, Vivian is entranced by the magic that follows in her wake. But there are hard lessons to be learned, and bitterly regrettable mistakes to be made. Vivian learns that to live the life she wants, she must live many lives, ceaselessly and ingeniously making them new.
'At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is,' she confides. And so Vivian sets forth her story, and that of the women around her – women who have lived as they truly are, out of step with a century that could never quite keep up with them.
REVIEW
The theatre aspect of this book was an instant sell for me. A world of showgirls and scandal, of glitter and greasepaint. But this is so much more than that. This is Viv's coming of age story. She makes mistakes (many, many mistakes) and she learns from them. This is entirely her story. I loved the writing style - you can literally hear Viv's voice in your head as you're reading. There's so many other wonderful, memorable characters too, from Viv's larger than life Aunt Peg and her absent Uncle Billy to Celia, the epitome of showgirl stereotype, but so beautiful you'd forgive her anything. The Lily Playhouse, a character in itself, is far from front and central on Broadway, it is a struggling theatre putting on pitiful, amateur shows that barely scrape a profit. But it has heart. Its residents and cast are a bunch of misfits, a dysfunctional family of sorts and Viv is soon accepted into the fold as events suddenly take a turn for the better. Life in New York is a heady dream, fuelled by alcohol and wild nights on the town. The world is vivid and bright, and Viv is blinded by it, so much so that she does not see the sordid underbelly beneath the glamour until it is too late.But this is not the end of Viv's story. This book reads like multiple novels in one, following the multiple stages of Viv's life, and once the theatre section was over I couldn't help but feel it was all a bit rushed. Viv's years organising entertainment for the army during the war , for example, I would've loved to read more about, and could probably have been a standalone novel of its own.
Framing the entire novel as a letter, albeit a very long one, struck me as a bit odd - as if anyone would divulge their entire life story in that much detail to a virtual stranger. Similarly the 'how I met your father' element of the novel - the mystery posed at the very start of the letter- wasn't really necessary, and the reveal was a bit of an anti climax for me. That said, I loved this novel, and I loved being part of Viv's world. This is my first Elizabeth Gilbert novel but I doubt it'll be my last!
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