City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

My mother had no idea what to do with me. We didn’t have the closest relationship even under the best of circumstances.

My father didn’t know what to do with me, either, though he was busy running his hematite mine and didn’t overly concern himself with the problem of his daughter.

As for my older brother, Walter, he was off doing great things at Princeton, and giving no thought to me, other than to disapprove of my irresponsible behavior.

Oh, dear. Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out.

A person only gets to move to New York City for the first time in her life once, Angela, and it’s a pretty big deal.

You can have your perfect New York, and other people can have theirs—but that one will always be mine.

Peg and Olive lived on the fourth floor of the Lily, in apartments separated by a common living area.

But the third floor, where I got to live, is where all the interesting activity happened.

When I think about the summer of 1940, Angela, I picture Celia Ray and me as two inky, dark points of lust sailing through the neon and shadows of New York City, in a nonstop search for action. And when I try to recall it in detail now, it all seems to run into one long, hot, sweaty night.

Until that night, I’d been able to kid myself that Celia Ray and I were exactly the same—just two equally worldly and gutsy women, conquering the city and having fun. But clearly that wasn’t true. I had been recreationally dabbling in danger, but Celia knew danger. She knew things—dark things—that I didn’t know. She knew things that she didn’t want me to know.

History has a pulse, they say—but mostly I have never been able to hear it, not even when it is drumming right in my goddamn ears.

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When a rescuer comes to save you, don’t shoot arrows at him.”

‘Live your life as you wish, my peach, but don’t let it bitch up the bloody show.’”

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