City of Girls

I picked up this book carrying the wrong idea about it. The name Elizabeth Gilbert still means Eat, Pray, Love to most people, and I walked in expecting something earnest about a woman repairing her life one country at a time. What I got instead was a loud, funny, sad theater novel narrated by a woman near ninety who has decided to stop editing her past. That surprise kept me reading. The narrator, Vivian Morris, is vain about her looks, honest about her appetites, and oddly lovable about both. She tells you right away that she was a silly girl. Then she shows you, in detail, exactly how silly, and dares you to judge her for it.

The whole book is framed as one long letter. In 2010, an old Vivian receives a note from a younger woman named Angela, whose mother has just died. Angela wants to know what Vivian really was to her father, a man Vivian knew for years. Vivian answers the only way she can. She cannot tell Angela her father to herself, she says, but she can tell Angela what he meant to her. What follows is her life story, from 1940 onward, written in a voice that swings between mischief and regret, often inside a single paragraph.

Flunking out of Vassar

Vivian starts at the bottom, and she wants you to know it. In 1940 she is nineteen, pretty, good with a needle and thread, and hopeless at college. She fails out of Vassar after a freshman year in which she spent her classroom hours thinking about clothes, boys, and parties. Her parents are well off, respectable, and cold in the particular way of people who show love by arranging things. They do not scold her for long. They simply pack her off to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a theater.

I found this opening easy to like because Vivian refuses to dress it up. She does not claim she was bored because she was too bright for school, or that some teacher failed to see her gifts. She says she was lazy and boy crazy and unserious, and that her parents were right to give up on the tuition money. There is something freeing about a narrator who will not ask for pity. You also get a clear picture of the Morris family in a few quick strokes. Her father is in business upstate. Her mother keeps a beautiful house. Her older brother Walter is the good child, headed for Princeton and already serious about duty in a way that will matter later. Vivian is the spare, the decorative daughter, and nobody quite knows what to do with her.

The train ride into Grand Central Station is one of my favorite passages in the early pages. Vivian expects glamour at every turn. What she gets first is Olive, her aunt's secretary, a plainly dressed older woman with a curt manner and eyes that miss nothing. Olive takes one look at this lipsticked teenager and clearly files her under trouble. That first meeting sets up one of the book's best slow reveals, because Olive turns out to be far more than a secretary, and Vivian takes most of the novel to understand what Peg's household really runs on.

The Lily Playhouse and Aunt Peg

The Lily Playhouse sits in midtown Manhattan, and calling it crumbling is kind. The paint peels. The seats sag. The productions are original revues aimed at working class neighbors who want songs, dances, a villain to hiss, and a row of pretty showgirls kicking up their legs. Vivian tells us the theater owns exactly three backdrops, a nineteenth century street corner, an elegant parlor, and an ocean liner, so every story the Lily tells has to fit one of those three places. Writers turn out plots to match the canvas. A lost heiress is found in the parlor. A runaway bride boards the ship. The street corner handles everything else.

Peg herself is a force. She learned show business putting on entertainments for sick soldiers when she served as a nurse in the earlier war, and she runs the Lily on nerve, charm, and borrowed money. She drinks martinis upstairs after the show. She knows every usher, chorus boy, and stagehand by name. She is also, Vivian slowly learns, a woman who built her own family out of strays and loyalists. Olive manages the money and the schedules and holds the whole place together with a spine of steel. Billy Buell, Peg's husband, lives in Hollywood writing for the pictures and sends ideas and cash when he feels like it. Peg keeps his old rooms ready above the theater, and that is where Vivian sleeps at first.

Vivian earns her keep with her sewing machine. This is the talent the book never lets you forget. She can fit a bodice, copy a Paris gown from a magazine sketch, and turn cheap fabric into something that looks rich under the lights. The Lily has no costume budget to speak of, so a girl who sews for free and likes showgirls is worth her weight in gold. I loved these workshop scenes. Gilbert clearly did her homework on how clothes get built, and the fittings give Vivian a natural way to meet everyone. The grand dame actress complaining about a waistline. The chorus girls begging for lower necklines. The stage manager begging for fewer sequins to sweep up. Through the sewing room door walks the entire company, one costume at a time.

If I have a complaint about this stretch, it is only that everything is so enjoyable that the plot barely moves for a while. That is deliberate, I think. Gilbert wants you to live in the theater the way Vivian does, so that when it breaks, you feel it. But readers who need a hook on every page may find the revue plots and costume fittings going on a touch long. Stay with it. The fun is the point, and the fall lands harder because of it.

Celia Ray teaches her everything

Every theater novel needs a spark, and here the spark is Celia Ray. Celia is a Lily showgirl, beautiful in a way that stops traffic, with a husky voice and a walk that Vivian describes with open envy. She is also funny, blunt, and completely without shame about what she wants. Within days of Vivian's arrival, Celia adopts her. Before long they are sharing Vivian's rooms, sharing clothes, and sharing nights on the town that start after the late show and end at dawn.

Through Celia, Vivian gets the education Vassar never gave her. The showgirls take her virginity problem in hand with practical cheer. A doctor they know, a genial man whose wife is often out of town, agrees to help, and the result is awkward and unromantic and, to the girls, hilarious. There is a good joke tucked in here that I will not spoil beyond saying the man's title flatters him. Vivian laughs at herself telling it fifty years later, and that laughter tells you a lot about who she becomes. She refuses to treat the story as a tragedy. It was clumsy, it was her choice, and she moved on.

After that, Vivian and Celia run wild together in a way the book describes without winking and without scolding. They drink gin. They pick up men, sailors and actors and salesmen, and take pleasure where they find it. Vivian is clear that she likes sex and likes it separate from love, a frankness that still feels unusual in historical fiction about young women. Older Vivian looks back at her teenage self with real tenderness. She thinks the young are always convinced they invented desire. She remembers believing it herself.

Two arrivals change the temperature of the theater. Edna Parker Watson is a celebrated English stage actress, a friend of Peg's from the nursing days, who flees to New York with her handsome husband Arthur after their London home is bombed. Edna is everything Vivian wants to be, poised, witty, dressed like a queen even in borrowed rooms. Vivian falls a little in love with her and becomes her personal seamstress, building costumes that show off Edna's shoulders and hide nothing of her confidence. Arthur is gorgeous and empty, the kind of man who smiles at every woman in the room and means it every time. Then there is Anthony, a young actor cast in smaller parts, sexy and restless, who becomes Vivian's first real boyfriend. Watching rehearsals with him, flirting in the wings, sewing late while he runs lines, Vivian feels for the first time like an adult with a place in the world.

A play, an opening night, and one terrible night

Billy Buell comes back from Hollywood with an idea worthy of his talent. Instead of another revue, the Lily will stage a real musical built around Edna. The show is called City of Girls, and Gilbert has visible fun inventing it, songs, dances, jokes, and a plot that uses all three of those famous backdrops. Vivian sews herself half blind making costumes. The company rehearses until tempers fray. Opening night arrives with rented flowers and borrowed jewelry and a packed house, and against all odds the show is a hit. For a few weeks the Lily is the talk of the town. Money comes in. Peg glows. Edna glows brighter.

Success brings a crowd of new faces and new temptations, and this is where young Vivian makes the mistake that shapes her life. One night, stung by jealousy over Anthony and a little drunk, she lets Arthur talk her into a night on the town with him and Celia. What starts as dancing and drinks ends in a hotel room with the three of them, and someone takes photographs. Days later, Peg and Olive sit Vivian down with terrible news. A gossip columnist in the Walter Winchell mold has the pictures and plans to print them with Vivian's name attached. For a nineteen year old from a good family in 1940, that means ruin.

What happens next gave me a new respect for Olive. The stern secretary drags Vivian to the Stork Club, sits down with the columnist over drinks, and talks him out of naming the girl. Only the married man and the showgirl get named, which is scandal enough. I will not detail the bargaining because the pleasure is in Olive's cool handling of a predator, but the scene flips everything you thought about her. She is not Peg's servant. She is Peg's partner in every sense that counts, and she protects the Lily's people like a guard dog.

Even rescued, Vivian has to leave. She phones her brother Walter, who drives down from Princeton with a friend and takes her home to face her parents. The car ride is brutal. Walter lectures her the whole way. His friend, a young man Vivian will meet again under very different circumstances, says something cruel to her that she carries for years. Back home, her parents receive her in frozen silence. The theater adventure is over. Or so it seems.

The war years

Vivian spends the next stretch doing penance in upstate New York, working in her father's business and trying to be the daughter her parents wanted. She dates a decent man named Jim Larsen, and they get engaged mostly because it seems like the sensible thing to do. She does not love him. She knows she does not love him. When Japan bombs Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 and Jim enlists, he breaks the engagement himself, and Vivian feels relief more than grief. That relief shames her a little, even decades later, and she tells you so.

Then Peg calls with a lifeline. The Lily company is performing shows for servicemen at the Navy Yard, short patriotic skits and songs, and she needs Vivian's sewing hands and Vivian herself. Vivian returns to New York a different person, quieter, harder working, careful about drink and men. The city has changed too. The boys are in uniform. The theaters are full of women doing jobs that used to belong to men. Rationing and headlines and casualty lists press in from every side. Gilbert writes this wartime Manhattan with real texture, the crowded buses, the stage door canteens, the girls who married in haste and were widowed by spring.

The worst news arrives by telegram. Walter, the golden brother, is killed in the war. Vivian's grief is tangled up with guilt, because part of her always resented his judgment, and now there will never be a chance to argue it out. Her parents fold inward. Peg's household mourns in its own loud way. I found these chapters slower than the theater chapters, and I think some readers will too. The sparkle dims on purpose. But the quiet pays off, because it clears the stage for the person who matters most in Vivian's life.

Frank, Marjorie, and the life she built

Frank walks into the story at the Navy Yard. He tells Vivian he knew her brother. Then, awkward and miserable, he admits he was the friend in the car that day, the one who said the cruel thing. He has carried it ever since. Vivian's first impulse is to walk away. Instead, slowly, she lets him make amends the only way he knows how. He shows up. They walk. All over the city, late at night, talking about everything and nothing, two people who cannot sleep.

I will not pretend this is a conventional romance, because the book insists it is not. Frank is married. He has a child. He also carries wounds from the war that make him unable to bear being touched, so he and Vivian never become lovers in the physical sense. What they have instead is a bond that lasts more than a decade, built on walks and talk and the occasional pressing of palms. He is the love of her life. She says so plainly, and by the time she says it, you believe her. It helps that Gilbert never oversells it. There are no grand speeches. There is just a man who shows up and a woman who tells him the truth, again and again, until telling the truth becomes a kind of devotion.

Around this same friendship, Vivian builds a working life. She and her friend Marjorie, a sharp older woman from the Lily circle, open a shop making custom clothing, with a specialty in bridal gowns. Vivian's sewing, once a party trick for showgirls, becomes a trade. She never marries. She never has children. She and Marjorie share a home for years and help raise Marjorie's son, and Vivian describes that household with more pride than anything else she ever did. When Frank asks her to make Angela's wedding dress, she pours everything she knows into it, and meeting the bride closes a circle she did not know was open.

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.

That line is the book's thesis, and Gilbert places it in old Vivian's mouth with real authority. Young Vivian spent years apologizing for the scandal, first to her parents, then to herself. Old Vivian has stopped. She does not claim she was blameless. She claims, instead, that a woman can make serious mistakes, enjoy plenty of pleasure along the way, and still grow into someone worth knowing. Whether you buy that argument may depend on how much patience you have for Vivian at nineteen. She is selfish. She barely notices the coming war until it touches her family. She treats kind people carelessly. Gilbert knows this and does not hide it. The letter format helps, because the older voice keeps correcting the younger one, adding the context the girl lacked.

A few honest cautions before you pick it up. This is a long novel, published in 2019 by Riverhead Books in a 480 page hardcover, and it reads like one. The middle sags in places, especially during the penance chapters upstate. Readers who want their heroines punished for enjoying sex will hate the book's refusal to punish Vivian. Readers who want a traditional love story may balk at a great love that never becomes physical. And anyone allergic to frank talk about bodies should know the book is explicit without ever turning crude. None of that bothered me much. I closed the book thinking about Peg and Olive, about Celia's laugh, about Frank waiting on a corner at midnight for a walk, and about Vivian at her sewing machine, making something beautiful out of scraps. For a novel about show business, that feels like the right kind of magic, the practical kind, cut and stitched by hand.