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The Dud Avocado

by Elaine Dundy, Terry Teachout (Introduction)

3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 · rating details · 2,345 ratings · 501 reviews

The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was fi...more

Paperback, 272 pages

Published June 5th 2007 by NYRB Classics (first published 1958)

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Jun 10, 2008 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction

I discovered this reissued novel on a swap rack at a hotel in Mexico City last summer...and I was delighted that I did. I've since passed it on to a friend, Heather, whom I met in Mexico is now on GR. It seems like that kind of book: one you should pass on to a friend or stranger. The first person narrator, a young American on her own in Paris, is beguiling. Her adventures and misadventures with men are charmingly recounted in a delightfully understated way. I think it's easy to forget that some...more

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Aug 04, 2007 Katie rated it 5 of 5 stars

I was prepared to give this a slightly lower rating (goodreads has got me thinking in stars) until the last forty or so pages, which are fabulous, probably perfect. How often can you say that? There's a description of a martini I had to write down. Well, okay, here it is: "We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air." Maybe I'm an alcoholic, but doesn't that sound great? Plus it's set off in its own paragraph. This story of a fun-loving gal's y...more

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Sep 16, 2012 Tosh rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a pretty good novel dealing with a (very) young girl making her mark romantically in Paris during the late 50's. Elaine Dundy's background is quite interesting. She was married to theater critic icon Kenneth Tynan as well as wriing a much admired biography on Elvis and his mother.

I met her briefly during a reading for "The Dud Avocado," and she sort of strikes me a a Louise Brooks type of character. Super book smart, lived a great life, and sexy.

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Oct 07, 2012 oriana rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to oriana by: L Magazine

Shelves: read-2012

I bought this on the street for $3. I'm really mystified, though: I was totally sure that I'd read a glowing review of it by Emily Gould some time ago, but the internet is hiding it from me or something. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Was it not Emily but someone else? I mean, someone put it in my head that this was one to grab, I didn't just make it up.

Anyways. Super terrifically swell. It's a story of a twenty-something gal in Paris in the fifties being sexy and young and silly and...more

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Sep 03, 2011 Maureen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

the dud avocado reads like a witty woman's take on the sun also rises, with the pink-haired protagonist sally jay gorce, an often silly struggling ingenue, going to parties, falling in love, and trying to find herself in paris in the fifties. eventually, she goes on a road trip to spain where she ends up as an extra on a bullfighter movie, and partying some more. unfortunately, for me the book began to drag while she was there, and i found the ending was rushed, grafted on, and out of sync with...more

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Dec 19, 2008 Christy rated it 4 of 5 stars

"The Dud Avocado" chronicles the adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, an American bon vivant living in Paris (pink hair; a married Italian lover; once ran away to become a bull-fighter). A delightful cross between "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "A Moveable Feast". I can't believe this progressive novel was written in the fifties.

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Sep 30, 2007 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

I picked this one up per Terry Teachout's recommendation - he's the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, and also wrote an excellent biography of H.L. Mencken. This is a favorite of his, and I certainly wasn't disappointed - you'd be hard pressed to find a better light reading experience. It's an innocent abroad story - Sally Jay Gorce travels to Paris, pursues acting, loses her virginity, and does all the funny things you'd expect an inexperience girl to do in a foreign city. It's laugh-ou...more

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Jan 06, 2009 Kimley rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: ingenues

Shelves: 20th-century, american-lit

Elaine Dundy is sort of an American Colette. There's even a bit with a cat.

The precocious young American girl in Paris has certainly been done before but our heroine Sally Jay has a lot more self awareness than the typical innocent abroad and at the same time she still manages to get herself into all kinds of amusingly compromising situations. Dundy can give one or two details about a character which are so spot on that you immediately feel like you've met this person. I certainly recognized man...more

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Mar 21, 2013 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Another book from the low end of the Keith Law 102 and one that, if I was judging by its cover, I was unlikely to have ever read. Indeed, between the tastefully-posed naked woman on the front and the blurb hearkening to Tropic of Cancer (one of the worst books I've ever read) on the back, had I picked it up I would not have given it a shot. And that would have been my loss, because this is a hilarious story of an American girl's blunders through Paris in the 50s.

It's always a surprise to me when...more Another book from the low end of the Keith Law 102 and one that, if I was judging by its cover, I was unlikely to have ever read. Indeed, between the tastefully-posed naked woman on the front and the blurb hearkening to Tropic of Cancer (one of the worst books I've ever read) on the back, had I picked it up I would not have given it a shot. And that would have been my loss, because this is a hilarious story of an American girl's blunders through Paris in the 50s.

It's always a surprise to me when I find a book, particularly an older book, that is funny. A lot of the time, first-person narrators are completely boring, but when you get one who just has an amusing voice then it's great. In this case, Sally Jay Gorce is not exactly a reliable narrator all of the time and that is a large part of why she's funny. Couched in these outrageous encounters where you can just feel that she's got it all wrong are extremely apt observations about life and human interaction. One about understanding perfect strangers while being confused by the people you know just made me sit up and go, "Wow! That's exactly it."

Maybe my favorite passage came early on, when Sally Jay imagines a break-up conversation she thinks she is going to have to have in her head, only she doesn't actually say any of it right then, and then like 30 pages later the conversation ends up happening about exactly as she foresaw it would, down to every reply to every thing that she said. It happens rarely like that in my own life but when it does, man.

The thing about Sally Jay is that she isn't likable, particularly, to the reader. Or at least not to me. But there are lots of great female characters who, if they were real people, I would never want to know. She is absorbed in her own world and petty towards those who've slighted her, though she's mostly nice when she isn't completely engrossed in that pettiness and short-sightedness. I was kind of reminded of Holly from Breakfast at Tiffany's - the book version, that is, without that Hollywood kind of ending. Holly is not especially pleasant but the men in the book all love her and remember her fondly anyway, even when she mistreats most of them. There's a bit more of an innocence about Sally Jay, who picks bad friends more than she does wrong to people herself.

Things take a bit of a dark turn in the latter third of the book, but by and large it's a light-hearted European adventure, and rather than something to dread, I'd put it in the category of, say, Lucky Jim and Under the Net, which are also among the funniest books I've ever read. The Dud Avocado is the only of these three written by an American from the long-term tourist perspective, and also the only one with a female main character. One more pleasant surprise.(less)

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Jan 03, 2013 Will rated it 2 of 5 stars

"Hated France when I first got here. Got on the train at Le Havre, and looked out of the window and thought it looked so exactly like America, I wanted to cry. The scenery flying past, the hills and barns and cows, were just the sort of things you keep coming across through a train window in the States. The Untrained Eye, I told myself, training it enough to see that all the signs were written in French, at the same time letting the untrained nose get its first whiff of garlic from my traveling...more "Hated France when I first got here. Got on the train at Le Havre, and looked out of the window and thought it looked so exactly like America, I wanted to cry. The scenery flying past, the hills and barns and cows, were just the sort of things you keep coming across through a train window in the States. The Untrained Eye, I told myself, training it enough to see that all the signs were written in French, at the same time letting the untrained nose get its first whiff of garlic from my traveling companions, and the untrained stomach its first attack of French dysentery. But still, these were the only differences. I asked myself finally what exactly did I expect France to look like? No answer.

I hate plans. Hate even listening to people telling me about theirs. Plans spoil suspense, I say. Don't believe in looking where I'm going. But that first day, trapped in the train speeding toward the complete unknown, it did just strike me as the teeniest weeniest bit careless that for all my insatiable longings and dreamings and pinings to get here, I knew nothing more concrete about my beloved France than what was painted on the screen in my nursery: children playing with hoops in the Bois de Boulogne.

And if the French countryside failed to impress me, boy, my first glimpse of Paris failed even more easily. Succeeded, I mean. Succeeded in not impressing me. I found an American Express man at the Gare and asked him to give me the name of a hotel and he directed me to one called the Hotel Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston! Real French. Real French comme ambiance aussi. It's probably the only perfect replica of a Victorian mausoleum still standing in Paris. There were a couple of busts of Victoria and Albert in the lobby, and it was full of dusty red plush and ancient frock-coated hotel retainers whose ambition was, if not actually to displease you, at least to depress you. Chamber pots everywhere and brass beds that sank and rocked when you lay down on them and floors that sloped away sharply when you tried walking on them. Just what I needed after six days on a boat and one on a train: pitching beds and lurching floors. Deathly ill for first fifty-two hours. Finally had my life saved by un petit medicin du pays working wonders with magic vials of brown fluid.

So I recovered and lived to see the Champs Elysees."(less)

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Aug 09, 2012 Shana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Once upon a time, I was told that what my writing had was voice, that it came naturally and effortlessly and was distinctly mine. Using this gift of my voice, I was meant to go out in the world and say something. Well, so far, that’s yet to happen, but it came as no surprise while reading the afterward of a novel I’d loved madly to see a quote from Gore Vidal to the writer, “You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go.” The novel was bewitching and loveable and exc...more Once upon a time, I was told that what my writing had was voice, that it came naturally and effortlessly and was distinctly mine. Using this gift of my voice, I was meant to go out in the world and say something. Well, so far, that’s yet to happen, but it came as no surprise while reading the afterward of a novel I’d loved madly to see a quote from Gore Vidal to the writer, “You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go.” The novel was bewitching and loveable and exciting, and what made it all of these things was the voice of its heroine, the singular Sally Jay Gorce. What a girl! What a voice! I felt reading it like there was nearly nothing like Sally Jay in the annals of literature, but at the same time, I felt like she was this girl I’d always longed to be or at least to know. And her thoughts, her sentences, there were dozens of them that left me exclaiming in the margins, “Yes!” or, “Nice!” There were dozens more that left me wondering if I would ever write a sentence half so good.

The Dud Avocado is a book I discovered thanks to an NPR bit about books you must read. I didn’t know the recommender, Rosecrans Baldwin, but I liked his ridiculous name and the name of his book, but most of all, I liked his description of Sally Jay and the line he quoted from the novel about her being “hellbent for living.” When I think about me in my best moments, when I’m not too down or too depressed, “hellbent for living” is more than apt. In fact, on more than one occasion, this tendency has found me all alone because not so many others are anxious to embrace hell or high water as I am. I cannot count the number of men I’ve scared off with this tendency or else dismissed for their lack of it, so meeting Sally Jay felt like meeting a sister. Sure, I’d like to think I have more sense than she has, though a few of my own stories might call that assertion into question, but her embrace of it all and her desire to go her own way, a desire she sometimes struggles against because of all the trouble it lands her in, these were familiar to me.

So was her voice. It’s the kind of voice I’ve heard in my head narrating my own stories—smart and smart-alecky, witty and funny, so wise and so foolish, so right and yet so completely wrong. To be clear, I’m not saying I’m any of those things except maybe foolish and completely wrong, but the voice in my head is. It’s all of them at once, just like Sally Jay. The inside of my head, and the voice that occupies it, is a mess, a complete disaster, and yet I somehow muddle through. I have my adventures and misadventures and utter lack of adventures, and I and this voice get though; we come out the other side of whatever it is with stories. Sure, thus far, there’ve been no pimps, no passport scandals, no nights in jail. Utterly lacking are love affairs with married and mistressed Italian diplomats or would-be Hollywood stars. I’ve never worn an evening gown before noon in Paris because all my laundry is dirty, though I do have Sally Jay's knack for not wearing the right clothes. Sally Jay’s life is not mine; but honestly, it isn’t anyone’s no matter how based in the author’s life it may or may not be. Her life is a bit too fairy tale, after all, but oh, what a luscious fairy tale it is!(less)

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Aug 03, 2011 Sunday rated it 1 of 5 stars

I hated this book because I don't enjoy bourgeois tourism as an expensive alternative to "coming of age" stories. This is a filthy fiction predecessor to things like "Eat, Pray, Love;" where cultures are charmingly fit into tampon-sized life lessons for the Beautiful Blonde American. It just wasn't very funny or enlightening to the large portion of Us Blondes gaining weight on gas station candy bars and dating guys named Carl. Travel braggery is a dirty no-no for an entire generation of girls, l...more

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Feb 27, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 3 of 5 stars

The protagonist of Dud Avocado, Sally Jay Gorce, is the reason that this book is engaging and ultimately readable. In 1955, American in Paris Sally is plucky, wry, sardonic, bohemian, sexually liberated, and spontaneous--like a butterfly out of the chrysalis. This book was written in 1958 but Elaine Dundy's prose and narrative still hold up. This was before feminism! But was it really? There are many instances in literature before the women's lib movement where female characters were assertive a...more

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Jul 10, 2010 Rick rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

A first novel originally published in 1958 to great critical and commercial, The Dud Avocado is one of those novels that periodically gets re-discovered, or at least rescued from decades of obscurity. The rescuer this time is New York Review Books and it is a worthy and entertaining rescue. Sally Jay Gorce is a 21-year old college graduate who is in Paris for a two year experience of freedom—eating, drinking, staying out, and meeting whoever she wants, however she wants. Of course, the excursion...more A first novel originally published in 1958 to great critical and commercial, The Dud Avocado is one of those novels that periodically gets re-discovered, or at least rescued from decades of obscurity. The rescuer this time is New York Review Books and it is a worthy and entertaining rescue. Sally Jay Gorce is a 21-year old college graduate who is in Paris for a two year experience of freedom—eating, drinking, staying out, and meeting whoever she wants, however she wants. Of course, the excursion is subsidized by a sympathetic relative, Uncle Roger. Sally Jay wants first to experience life and perhaps to become an actress. She doesn't want to become a librarian, a fate she fears for some reason.

So instead she flees home and she falls in with a Left Bank crowd of partiers who happen to either be or want to be painters, photographers, directors, actors, sculptors, models, and writers. She has an affair with an Italian diplomat, falls in love with an American director, does some acting in a play and later in a film, loses her passport, and gets entangled with some unsavory characters who poach the vulnerable of Bohemia, of whom there are many.

With less bite, particularly at the end, it is a lesser The Sun Also Rises from a female perspective a generation later. The generation is adrift, if not lost, and Sally Jay is a sharp-witted, contentious and determined protagonist. She is nobody’s fool but her own and that is sufficient to get her into scrapes of deepening danger. She is no one’s victim and, not counting the unnecessary happily ever after ending, gets herself out of her own mess.

Dundy is a funny and sharply observant writer. Trading in one cliché for another, the fairy tale ending keeps it from being a cautionary tale, but for most of its pages it is a wonderful comedy of manners, racy and acid tongued. “A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.” “It’s amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you don’t know that confuse you.” After someone describes her as a “mere child” she notes: “I felt my attention wandering off. It generally does at the phrase ‘mere child.’” The dialogue is light-years more smart, real, eager, at times savage and humorous than any exchanges ever on “Sex and the City,” series or movies.

Dundy was ahead of her time in writing as she did about what she did. A stronger ending that avoided either the fairy tale or cautionary tale conclusion would have lifted this into a whole other league but it succeeds quite well as a pointed social satire that takes very few prisoners.(less)

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Mar 09, 2010 Kat Hagedorn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed, fiction

http://tinyurl.com/59km6m

As the back cover says, "deceptive." Essentially, a tale of the life and times of a young American girl in Paris in the 50s, there's much more depth to this story than at first blush.

Firstly, the author is a great storyteller, weaving honesty, complicity, faith, and the "joys" of being a woman in a man's world into something cohesive. (The book is somewhat autobiographical, so writing from life...) In particular, I like one descriptive passage on why hosting dinner parti...more

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May 16, 2009 Julia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009-list

What's more fun than discovering a book that makes you laugh out loud in the middle of the night, while you're reading it by the light of your mobile phone so you can get just one more page in? How about a book that makes you laugh, set in Paris in the 50s, about a totally outrageous girl who would have shaken Holden Caulfield by the shoulders or swung him out on the dance floor to dance some of his jitters away.

Sally Jay has a streak of Holden about her though too - this is a coming of age nove...more

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Mar 26, 2013 Stephen rated it 1 of 5 stars

If navel-gazing were a sport, Elaine Dundy would win olympic gold. In this pointless pseudo-novel (actually a memoir), which reads like A Moveable Feast crossed with Sex and the City (yet somehow managing to surpass both in banality and narcissism), a young American expatriate in Paris deals with such vital problems as "if I could only figure out if it was Larry I was in love with, or just love" and the worry that she's too much of a stereotypical tourist (and then wondering if her worrying is i...more

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Feb 23, 2008 Teri rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Teri by: bas bleu

Shelves: fiction, 2008

I think Elaine Dundy is a brilliant writer. That being said, I don't know if I can recommend this book to anyone. It took me about 50 pages to decide I did indeed like it, even with the great writing. The story is strange to me at times. I liked it more as I continued on. Still I don't know if it will appeal to any of my friends. It was written in 1958 and I am sure a very wild book for the time. Groucho Marx and Laurence Olivier were fans of this book. If that says anything.

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Nov 27, 2011 Melee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Well! I was pleasantly surprised by this book! Or the ending, at least; I really did not see the last 50 pages coming. Perhaps they didn't perfectly align with the rest of the book, but I didn't (and don't) really care. The heroine (Sally Jay) impressed me too! She was not nearly as glibly amoral as I thought she would be. She was charming, amusing, and (at times) relatable.
There were a few boggy scenes to be waded through, but there was always something amusing or interesting waiting on the oth...more

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Jul 11, 2011 Alyx rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read this one because it was on This Recording's list of the 100 best novels. Since This Recording contributors seem like liberal arts degree holders who fetishize their free time (i.e., like many of my friends), I know they've read more literature than I have and took to their recommendation. Until the last section, this book is mostly champagne bubbles and caviar misadventures as not-too-struggling actress Sally Jay Gorce leads a life of no real consequence filled with boys in Paris that's f...more

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Mar 05, 2013 Therese rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: french, literary-and-general-fiction

(3.5 stars, really, because it meandered a bit much in part II.) This book was a hoot. Published in 1958 or so, it's full of funny American 50s slang, and in the few days it's taken me to read it, I've started going around calling people buster and saying things are a hoot and you've got my number all right. Anyway, it's an innocents abroad tale about an American girl who gets funded by her rich uncle to spend 2 years traveling wherever she likes. She heads straight to Paris and then gets stuck...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Stephanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

I admit, I almost gave up on this one. I had high expectations and at first I could not get into it, probably because I was too into my own (mis)adventures to care. I lugged it around on various international flights, train rides and beach outings...bookmark stuck on page eighty-something. I would stuff it deep in my carry-on and cover it up with international fashion magazines as I couldn't bear to admit I might never finish it; Embarrassed that I could not leisurely enjoy this small, iconic b...more

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Feb 17, 2009 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a white-hot fury of a book. Hilarious and infuriating at the same time, how do you not fall in love with Sally Jay Gorce? It's impossible to overstate how fresh and original this story reads, and I found myself laughing at one line after another. It's like discovering that your favorite comic actually lived fifty years ago, and decimated more sacred cows than you'd ever known existed. Why do I always think the 50s were more tame than they actually were?

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Jul 03, 2012 Joanne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Oh, to be 20-something again! There's something about one's early 20s that really can't be replicated, especially if it involves traveling abroad. This is an age when you're old enough to enjoy the experience but still stupid enough to live with a certain amount of abandon. Elaine Dundy's 1958 novel The Dud Avocado is narrated by a young American, Sally Jay Gorce, who travels abroad searching for an adventure. Set in Paris circa 1950's, Sally wants to experience life, and relishes it to its full...more

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May 20, 2012 Julie Barrett rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: finished-2012

A while ago I read an article in a magazine in which the author wrote about befriending Dundy at AA meetings in LA and not realizing for the longest time that the sweet little old lady at the meetings was actually an author and the ex-wife of the critic Kenneth Tynan. Dang, I wish I recalled what magazine that was! Anyway, I wrote down the name of Dundy's debut novel The Dud Avacado in my to-read notebook & just the other week decided now was the time to read it.

It's a short book & a qu...more A while ago I read an article in a magazine in which the author wrote about befriending Dundy at AA meetings in LA and not realizing for the longest time that the sweet little old lady at the meetings was actually an author and the ex-wife of the critic Kenneth Tynan. Dang, I wish I recalled what magazine that was! Anyway, I wrote down the name of Dundy's debut novel The Dud Avacado in my to-read notebook & just the other week decided now was the time to read it.

It's a short book & a quick read. I enjoyed Dundy's descriptions of Paris in the late 50s. Very bongos and beatniks. I kept thinking of that Audrey Hepburn movie Funny Face, when Audrey goes to Paris for that modeling assignment & meets the wacky beatnik.

The book itself is like the main character Sally Jay - entertaining & funny & slightly all over the place. There is not much of a plot - the book follows the adventures of Sally Jay during her year in Paris after college. Men she dates, parties she attends, cafes she hangs out in, odd jobs she does, trips she takes.

I was surprised at how risque the book was, considering it was written & published in the late 50's. Sally Jay has an orgasm in a cafe in the first chapter of the book! In public. She sleeps around, does some nude modeling & nothing horrid befalls her. She is not punished for her sexuality. Because the character is written by a woman? I think so. I don't think a man could have written this character without punishing her in some sense.

Dundy became quite well known for a while after this book came out. In the afterward she talks about all the famous authors who told her wonderful compliments about the book. Hemingway, Gore Vidal, Irwin Shaw etc. Also that her husband Kenneth Tynan became upset that she wrote a best selling, well received novel. So much so that he actually threw a copy of her book out the window during a fight. Talk about no support at home! I now want to read Dundy's memoir - seems like she had a hell of a life. Also in the afterward, she writes about all the people who asked her how much Sally Jay was based on herself. The answer? "All the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up." Sounds like her memoir is going to be pretty good.(less)

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Mar 04, 2011 Very rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels, 2011, borrowed, hipsteria, style-points, xx, city-girls, manic-pixie-dreamgirls, first-person, ooh-la-la

Elaine Dundy knows how to capture a scene. The parts of the book where something is actually happening work like gangbusters. The dialogue is clever but realistic. The details are pertinent but also hilarious. Most of the first chapter is a really long scene between the narrator and her new crush as they chat at a Paris café. If you are anything like me, this scene will pull you in. And you’ll assume that the rest of the book will continue in this fashion. But the book has other plans.

Every so...more

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Dec 01, 2012 kasia rated it 5 of 5 stars

I stumbled across this one somewhat randomly, and I was instantly hooked. It is infectiously delightful, riotously funny, and just overall great. Salinger meets Breakfast at Tiffany's. The madcap adventures of a self-absorbed and slightly ridiculous but strangely lovable young woman in Paris who is living life to the max. Hilarious hijinx galore. Though Sally Jay Gorce makes some terrible decisions, sometimes out of naivete, sometimes out of sheer idiocy, she also has a certain steely intelligen...more

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Jul 23, 2011 Jon added it · review of another edition

Fab novel from 1958 about an American girl in Paris and her relationship with another American, the mercurial, mysterious Larry, who's her apparent savior or a satanic bastard, depending on which chapter of the book one is reading. Somewhat like THE BELL-JAR, if Plath had had a sense of humor and been less self-absorbed. (Interestingly, Plath and Dundy both had disastrous marriages to English writers, though Dundy, made of sterner stuff, survived her marriage to Kenneth Tynan.) More than mere fr...more

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Dec 27, 2008 Tamara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Much smarter than the rather chick lit-ish cover suggests, especially given that it was written in 1958. The narrator is hilarious in her stream of consciousness and shameless self-absorption. One of the best lines: "I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it." A great light read... pick it up in the airport bookstore on...more

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Jan 19, 2008 Heather rated it 5 of 5 stars

Although it takes place long before my "time," it brought back many memories of my own experience living abroad in Spain, as well as in Mexico. It captures the spirit of a young woman, testing and re-defining her personal limits, values and aspirations, living it up along the way. It particular hit me, as it was passed on to me by a new acquaintance who somehow sensed the appropriateness!

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About Elaine Dundy

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) grew up in New York City and Long Island. After graduating from Sweet Briar College in 1943 she worked as an actress in Paris and, later, London, where she met her future husband, the theater critic Kenneth Tynan. Dundy wrote three novels, The Dud Avocado (1958), The Old Man and Me (1964), and The Injured Party (1974); a play, My Place (produced in 1962); biographies of El...more

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Quotes from The Dud Avocado

“I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.” — 14 people liked it

“The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!” — 12 people liked it

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avg rating	preview: The Dud Avocado Goodreads rating: 3.60 (2345 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1059856.The_Dud_Avocado?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320519470l/1059856.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1059856.The_Dud_Avocado?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy[/url]

The Dud Avocado

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