Desire, freedom and hot flashes after dark
Its narrator looks back from old age and refuses to reduce a woman’s life to her worst mistake. Gilbert places young Vivian in the theater world of 1940s New York, where costumes, friendship, sex, scandal, war, and unconventional love reshape her understanding of freedom. Hot flashes may mark bodily transition, but the older narrator’s unabashed history of desire refuses the idea that sexuality belongs only to reproductive youth. In a season of transition, the book celebrates pleasure while taking consequences seriously. A woman can be sexually adventurous, morally imperfect, loyal, useful, and capable of becoming wiser without rewriting her younger self as either innocent or ruined.
About Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert stopped writing to care full-time for her partner, Rayya Elias, during terminal cancer. After Elias died, Gilbert returned to City of Girls and called the exuberant novel the lightest, funniest work she had created from her darkest grief.
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