Book Club October 2020- City of Girls

By: Elizabeth Gilbert
Published year: 2019
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Pages: 496

Amazon Barnes & Noble

Summary (Provided by Goodreads): In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters, from the fun-chasing showgirls to a sexy male actor, a grand-dame actress, a lady-killer writer, and no-nonsense stage manager. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves - and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest.

Now ninety-five years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life - and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it. "At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time," she muses. "After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is." Written with a powerful wisdom about human desire and connection, City of Girls is a love story like no other.

What I thought

I remember seeing this book all over the place when it first came out. I love the cover and I do remember picking it up a few times to read the summary. However, there must have been something about it that didn’t jump out at me because I never picked it up.

Vivian receives a letter from Angela asking her what exactly her relationship with her father had been. As an answer to Angela’s letter, Vivian decides to write her a 500 page book, pretty much about her entire life. Vivian tells the story of her life when she moved to New York City at 19, which takes up the majority of the book, but then she does quickly move through the rest of her life in the last 200 pages or so.

I didn’t mind the style of the writing, which definitely kept the tone of it being a letter throughout the book. However, this is definitely the kind of book that doesn’t really seem to have a set plot point moving it along. It truly is about Vivian’s life and our lives don’t really have set plot points. Also, I was easily 300 pages in and still hadn’t (obviously at least) met Angela’s father. All I could think of was the fact that if I had been Angela reading this novel of a letter, by 300 pages I would have been irritated and annoyed. I wouldn’t have felt the need to know this woman’s entire life story.

There is a line in this story in which one character tells Vivian she is not an interesting woman and she will never be an interesting woman and, unfortunately, I feel like I have to agree. Looking back on the story, I feel like this book/letter is Vivian trying to convince one last person that she is an interesting woman when really she isn’t.

This is one of those odd books that, while I was reading it, I didn’t mind it and, in fact, enjoyed a decent amount of it. But, now that I’ve finished it and sat with it for a bit, I find more and more that I don’t like about it.

What Book Club Thought

Minus Stephanie, it seems as though everyone else liked the book a little more than I did. Denise and Stephanie both listened the audiobook. Interestingly, they both got stuck at a similar point. It lead to a good discussion about how this book is more interesting in the second half than the first. We did also discuss how much of the book could have been left out. A lot of the discussion made me realize that I liked portions of the book a lot more than I was giving it credit for.

It was a good book club book choice because it lead to a lot of good discussion. Denise also pointed out that one of the reasons she liked the book so much was because of how strong of a woman Vivian needed to be to be who she was during that time.