Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
AVATAR OF FEMALE PLEASURE’S SEXY NOVEL
THERE’S a lot of bad behaviour in Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, City of
Girls, a lively period novel about a tribe of women – theatre folk! – set primarily during World War II.
They have sex with multiple strangers and one another; they drink to excess for weeks on end; and they make bone-headed decisions for which they suffer not too terribly. (Crabs, hangovers and snubs are among the sternest punishments.)
They follow their appetites, and, refreshingly, nobody dies or gets exiled for too long or has to wear a scarlet letter.
It is a storyline that has long been dear to Gilbert, an avatar of among other things female pleasure, since the success of her 2006 blockbuster memoir, Eat Pray Love, and the wan movie adaptation, starring Julia Roberts, that followed it in 2010.
Recounting her adventures in
Italy, India and Bali, the book turned Gilbert, a well-regarded magazine writer and author who made her bones as one of the boys, sometimes literally (she once spent a week living as a man for GQ), into a goddess of chick lit: a self-help guru anointed by Oprah and TED. The movie made her a wealthy woman.
But for years after Eat Pray Love was published, critics gnashed their teeth over her privilege and silky prose, and questioned the depths of her suffering and the extent of her faith, all the while calculating the value of good fortune. She faced this with typical moxie and humour.
On a recent bright morning, Gilbert strode into D’Amico Coffee on Court Street in Brooklyn, open since 1948, like a regular.
She turns 50 this month, but she looked a decade or so younger; she wore her short platinum hair tucked behind her ears, a nubbly grey scarf, a cadet-blue velvet frock coat and black pants tucked into black leather boots, combat style.
She choose to meet here.
Gilbert has lately begun guarding the privacy of her physical domicile.
“On this stuff I just follow my instinct, and I guess I’ve decided that my home is where I get to live.”
She modelled her protagonist’s flat on her own one-bedroom.
Vivian Morris, the central character of City of Girls, is a 19-yearold drop-out and sensualist who is sent by her disapproving parents to live with her Aunt Peg in Manhattan.
Peg, who has a weakness for the bottle and for her estranged husband, a playboy actor and playwright, runs a down-on-its-luck theatre. It doubles as a boardinghouse for showgirls and others involved in its productions, all of which is overseen by a stern British aide-de-camp named Olive who turns out to be more than Peg’s secretary.
A storied British actress named Edna Parker Watson and her doltish husband flee London when the Blitz destroys their house.
They, too, are taken in by Peg, and the fulcrum of the book is the musical that’s created as a vehicle for Edna, which ends up saving the playhouse from financial ruin, though Vivian transgresses in a spectacular fashion. Gilbert renders the play, also titled
City of Girls, like a pro, complete with musical numbers, a rousing opening night prayer and reviews.
The protagonist’s sex scenes are pretty good too, from the afternoon of Vivian’s deflowering, a hilarious scheduled encounter with a middleage married veterinarian, to a lusty first-crush affair with the play’s leading man. Sex is mostly sport to Vivian, who pursues it cheerfully through late middle age, while staying resolutely single.
“Female desire has a mind of its own,” Gilbert said. “Female desire is more about a woman going on the hunt for what she wants.”
She said she wanted to write a book that rendered it accurately, as something “muscular, messy, proactive, complex”.
“And I wanted to write a book about a woman who was willing to take risks with her safety in order to be sexual. I didn’t want to pretend that there is no consequence to promiscuity – Vivian certainly faces consequences. But she’s not destroyed by her desire, nor is she ruined by its consequences.”
Nor was Gilbert. “Ruination has not been my experience as a promiscuous girl and it’s not been the experience of a lot of people I know. You can actually survive your terrible judgment.”
The epigraph of Eat Pray Love is “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth!” – an exhortation to Gilbert delivered by Sheryl Louise Moller, an actress and old friend.
“She wrote this book that she thought maybe 60 people would read,” Moller said.
“It was like a diary, a purge. Then I watched her become this person Oprah would have on her show.
“Liz is an old-school storyteller: When she tells a story about you, you sit slack-jawed at the epic-ness of your own tale. I watched her become this person who could get up on stage and tell people what they needed to hear. And connect with those readers.
“I watched her become the patron saint of any author who’s been hugely successful and had to write the next thing. She knows what it’s like to be overwhelmed by fame.
“She is absolutely committed to the act of creation, which is why she is able to start again, over and over again.” |