A young girl in the 1950’s leaves her home of the States and sets off to Paris in search of adventure. Firmly turning he back on all things conventional Sally Jay embarks on adventures and a swift education in growing up. A great coming of age book.
This has always been my favourite rite-of-passage book. I much prefer Sally Jay Gorce to Holden Caulfield and the others. She is charm itself. No other book makes me want to time-travel so much, to go to Paris in the ’50s and drift about being frivolous and spontaneous and generally intoxicated by the very idea of love.
'One of the best novels about growing up fast' GUARDIAN
'One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence' OBSERVER
'Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true' EVENING STANDARD
The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living.
Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It's the 1950s, she's young and she's in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. Embarking on an educational programme that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realises he's single and wants to marry her); nights in cabarets and jazz clubs in the company of assorted "citizens of the world"; an entanglement with a charming psychopath and a bit part in a film financed by a famous matador.
But an education like this doesn't come cheap. Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence?
Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
'A champagne cocktail ... Rich, invigorating, and deceptively simple to the taste ... One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence' OBSERVER
'A carbonated first novel that will set male readers to thinking sheepishly of plain wrappers' TIME MAGAZINE
'As delightful and delicate an examination of how it is to be twenty and in love and in Paris as I've ever read' SUNDAY TIMES
'Scandalous and entertaining ... Both funny and true' EVENING STANDARD
A young American loose in Paris in 1958 is caught up in a heady whirl of affairs, champagne cocktails, outrageous evening frocks and, before she knows it, a plot of sinister implications. As a funny-sad rites-of-passage story, this is up there with Catcher in the Rye, and in Sally Jay Gorce, Dundy gave the 20th century one of its most memorable heroines. (Kirkus UK)
Author
About Elaine Dundy
Elaine Dundy was born in New York. As an actress she worked in Paris and London and then became a writer. She has written plays, biographies and novels including the bestselling THE DUD AVOCADO, her first novel.
