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.
'Funny, funny, funny. She's wicked and wise' GRETA GERWIG 'One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence' OBSERVER 'Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true' EVENING STANDARD 'One of the best novels about growing up fast' GUARDIAN
Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it . . .
Sally Jay Gorce is a girl hellbent on living. It's the 1950s and she's an American in Paris: witty, headstrong and disaster-prone. She dyes her hair pink, wears evening dresses in the daytime and prowls the Left Bank in search of love, adventure and fame. 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?
As effervescent as a champagne cocktail, The Dud Avocado is a deliciously funny cult classic.
'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.
