The City of Girls

In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris was expelled from Vassar College. Her parents sent her to New York to live with her Aunt Peg, owner of the lavish but crumbling Lily Playhouse Theatre. There Vivian meets a whole cosmos of atypical and charismatic characters. But when she gets involved in a scandal, her world in New York is turned upside down. But it's the dramatic change that leads her to a new understanding of freedom and, ultimately, to the love of her life.

Now 95, Vivian recalls the events of those years not so much with regret as with pleasure. At some point, she says, a woman just gets tired of being ashamed of everything. And she is finally free to be herself.

Elizabeth Gilbert tells the extraordinary story of a young woman who discovers that you don't have to be a good girl to be a good person. Written with profound wisdom about human longings and relationships, the novel City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and self-examination at the end of a human life.