City of Girls (42 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
So many generous New Yorkers (past and present) shared of themselves in order to help me create this book.
Brooklyn native Margaret Cordi—who has been my brilliant and beloved friend for thirty years—guided me through my research, accompanied me on all my field trips, tracked down my sources, and proofread the hell out of these pages in an insanely short amount of time. But she
also stirred up my joy and excitement about this project when I was under deadline and under stress. Margaret: There is simply no way I could have written this story without you. Let’s always be working on a novel together, okay?
I will be forever grateful to Norma Amigo—the most gorgeous and charismatic nonagenarian I ever met—for telling me all about her days and nights as a Manhattan showgirl.
It was Norma’s unabashed sensuality and independence (as well as her unprintable answer to my question “Why did you never want to get married?”) that allowed Vivian to come into full and free existence.
For more background on the New York City entertainment world of the 1940s and 1950s, I am also grateful to Peggy Winslow Baum (actress), the late Phyllis Westermann (songwriter and producer),
Paulette Harwood (dancer), and the lovely Laurie Sanderson (keeper of the Ziegfeld flame).
For help in understanding and unearthing a Times Square that will never again exist, David Freeland was an essential and fascinating guide.
Shareen Mitchell’s insights and sensitivity about wedding gowns, fashion, and how to humble yourself in service to nervous brides completely shaped this aspect of
Vivian’s story. Thank you also to Leah Cahill, for her lessons in sewing and tailoring. Jesse Thorn served as an invaluable emergency contact for my questions about men’s style.
Andrew Gustafson opened up the wonders of the Brooklyn Navy Yard for me. Bernard Whalen, Ricky Conte, and Joe and Lucy De Carlo helped me to understand the life of a Brooklyn patrolman. The regulars at D’Amico Coffee
in Carroll Gardens took me on the most colorful trip through time you could ever imagine. So thank you to Joanie D’Amico, Rose Cusumano, Danny Calcaterra, and Paul and Nancy Gentile for sharing your stories. You guys really made me wish I had grown up in South Brooklyn back in the day.
Thank you to my father, John Gilbert (LTJG, ret., USS
Johnston
), for helping me to get the Navy details right.
I am grateful to my mother, Carole Gilbert, for teaching me how to work my ass off and how to be resilient in the face of life’s difficulties. (I never needed it more than this year, Mom.) I am grateful to Catherine and James Murdock for their keen copyediting skills. Because of you this book has five thousand fewer commas than it needed.
Without the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York
Public Library, I would not have been able to read the papers of Katharine
Cornell, and without Katharine Cornell, there would be no Edna Parker Watson.
I am grateful to my great-aunt Lolly, for giving me those old Alexander Woollcott books, which set me down the path of this story. But most of all, Lolly, thank you for modeling the extraordinary optimism, cheer, and strength that make me want
to be a better and braver woman.
I am grateful to my extraordinary team at Riverhead—Geoff Kloske, Sarah McGrath, Jynne Martin, Helen Yentus, Kate Stark, Lydia Hirt, Shailyn Tavella, Alison Fairbrother, and the late and beloved Liz Hohenadel—for publishing my books so brilliantly and boldly. Thank you to Markus Dohle and Madeline McIntosh for investing in me and believing in me. Thank you, also,
to my friends and colleagues at Bloomsbury—Alexandra Pringle, Tram-Anh Doan, Kathleen Farrar, and Ros Ellis—for keeping things so bright and cool on the other side of the Atlantic.
Dave Cahill and Anthony Kwasi Adjei: I cannot run my world without you. I hope I never have to!
Thank you to Martha Beck, Karen Gerdes, and Rowan Mangan, for reading thousands of pages of my writing over the past
few years, and for wrapping me up in the great big wingspan of your collective love. Thank you to Glennon Doyle, for sitting by my door all those nights. I needed it, and I am grateful.
Thank you to my sister-wives, Gigi Madl and Stacey Weinberg, for their love and sacrifice during such a hard season of pain and loss. I could not have survived 2017 without you.
Thank you to Sheryl Moller, Jennie
Willink, Jonny Miles, and Anita Schwartz, for being enthusiastic early readers of these pages. Thank you to Billy Buell, for lending me the use of his fabulous name.
Sarah Chalfant: As ever, you are the wind beneath my wings.
Miriam Feuerle: As ever, I love rolling with you.
Lastly, a message to Rayya Elias: I know how badly you wanted to be here at my side while I wrote this novel. All I can
tell you, baby, is that you
were
. You are never not at my side. You are my heart. I will always love you.
Also available by Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
Readers of all ages and walks of life have drawn inspiration from Elizabeth Gilbert’s books for years. Now, this beloved author shares her wisdom and unique understanding of creativity, shattering the perceptions of mystery and suffering that surround the process – and showing us all just how easy it can be.
By sharing stories from her own life,
as well as those from her friends and the people that have inspired her, Elizabeth Gilbert challenges us to embrace our curiosity, tackle what we most love and face down what we most fear.
Whether you long to write a book, create art, cope with challenges at work, embark on a long-held dream, or simply to make your everyday life more vivid and rewarding, Big Magic will take you on a journey of
exploration filled with wonder and unexpected joys.
‘Gilbert dares us into adventures of worldly discovery’ Barbara Kingsolver
‘If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her … Gilbert’s prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible’ Jennifer Egan
‘Sumptuous ... Gilbert’s prose is by turns flinty,
funny, and incandescent’ New Yorker
The Signature of All Things
Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize
From the moment Alma Whittaker steps into the world, everything about life intrigues her. Instilled with an unquenchable sense of wonder by her father, a botanical explorer and the richest man in the New World, Alma is raised in a house of luxury and curiosity. It is not
long before she becomes a gifted botanist in her own right. But as she flourishes and her research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, the man she comes to love draws her in the opposite direction – into the realm of the spiritual, the divine and the magical.
The Signature of All Things
soars across the globe of the nineteenth century, from London and Peru, to Philadelphia, Tahiti
and beyond. Peopled with extraordinary characters along the way, most of all it has an unforgettable heroine in Alma Whittaker.
‘The story of Alma Whittaker’s journey of discovery has irresistible momentum’ Helen Dunmore,
The Times
‘A straight-up storyteller who dares us into adventures of worldly discovery’ Barbara Kingsolver,
New York Times Book Review
‘Charming and compelling ... A big novel
in all senses – extensively researched, compellingly readable and with a powerful charm that will surely propel it towards the bestseller lists’ Jane Shilling,
Daily Telegraph
At Home on the Range
Recently, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mother’s attic for decades. Among the old, dusty hardbacks was a book called
At Home on the Range
, written by her great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter – a workaday cookbook devoted to seeking out epicurean adventures that was far ahead of its time.
Stressing the importance
of sourcing food locally and eating well,
At Home on the Range
is a humorous and eminently useable volume with original family recipes that reveals where Elizabeth Gilbert inherited her love of food and warm, infectious prose.
‘Ideal for those who like their recipes to come with a back story ... The book is tremendously funny, and her cooking was way ahead of her time’ Sally Hughes,
BBC Good
Food Magazine
‘Hilarious and has sections with blissful titles such as Weekend Guests without a Weakened Hostess’
English Home
Committed
At the end of her bestselling memoir
Eat Pray Love
, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe – a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both survivors of difficult divorces. Enough
said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the U.S. government, who – after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing – gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again.
Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving completely into this topic, trying
with all her might to discover (through historical research, interviews and much personal reflection) what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is. The result is
Committed
– a witty and intelligent contemplation of marriage that debunks myths, unthreads fears and suggests that sometimes even the most romantic of souls must trade in her amorous fantasies for the humbling responsibility
of adulthood.
‘Like
Eat Pray Love
, her follow-up,
Committed
, feels irresistibly confessional ... I found myself guzzling
Committed
, reading it in mighty chunks, far into the night. Whenever I put it down, it was pinched by my mother or sister’
Sunday Times
‘An unblinkered consideration of what marriage really means’
Woman & Home
‘Insightful ... She speaks for many who question the bliss in
conjugal bonds, or, at least, those who want to understand how the tradition still perpetuates. For better or worse’
Vogue
Eat Pray Love
It’s 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby – and she doesn't want any of it. A divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and
balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness
begins to creep up on her.
‘A writer of incandescent talent’ Annie Proulx
‘If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her ... Gilbert’s prose is fuelled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible’ Jennifer Egan,
New York Times
‘A witty, honest account of loss and new beginnings, this will be enjoyed by anyone
who’s realised “having it all” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’
Easy Living
Pilgrims
The cowboys, strippers, labourers and magicians of
Pilgrims
are all on their way to being somewhere, or someone, else. Some are browbeaten and world-weary, others are deluded and naïve, yet all seek companionship as fiercely as they can. A tough East Coast girl dares a western cowboy to run off with her; a matronly bar owner falls in love with her nephew; an innocent teenager falls
hopelessly for the local bully’s sister.
These are tough heroes and heroines, hardened by their experiences, who struggle for their epiphanies. Yet hope is never far away and though they may act blindly, they always act bravely. Sharply drawn and tenderly observed,
Pilgrims
is filled with Gilbert’s inimitable humour and warmth.
‘Gilbert takes us on a grit-strewn ride into the heart of Country
and Western territory: good old boys, cowgirls, dingy bars, the backwaters and empty plains of America’
Sunday Times
‘The distinctive cant of Gilbert’s stories recalls the off-kilter worlds of T. Craghessan Boyle, and she embraces the bizarre and fabulous with similar enthusiasm ... But blunt summaries capture none of Gilbert’s subtlety. Whether trashing those on high or celebrating those below,
she moves stealthily, avoiding the temptation to grandstand, moralize or, especially, patronize’
New York Times Book Review
‘This first-time writer has all the hallmarks of a great writer: sympathy, wit, and an amazing ear for dialogue’
Harper’s Bazaar
Stern Men
On two remote islands off the coast of Maine, the local lobstermen have fought savagely for generations over the fishing rights to the ocean waters between them. Young Ruth Thomas is born into this feud, the daughter of one of the greediest lobstermen in Maine. Eighteen years old, as smart as a whip, and irredeemably unromantic, Ruth returns home from boarding school determined to
throw her education overboard and join the ‘stern-men’. As the feud escalates, she helps work the lobster boats, brushes up on her profanity, and eventually falls for a handsome young lobsterman. A funny, sparkling novel of unlikely friendships and family ties,
Stern Men
captures a feisty American spirit through this unforgettable heroine who is destined for greatness despite herself.
‘A wonderful
first novel about life, love and lobster fishing ...
Stern Men
is high entertainment’
USA Today
‘An impressive achievement’
Observer
‘A mix of Annie Proulx and John Irving ... memorable and enjoyable’
The Times