The Dud Avocado (Virago Modern Classics)

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Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundys Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Bottle that up at home with two failed attempts to produce a cis son undergoing their own coming of ages in plain view, and you get the type of parent that would be considered a "tiger mom" were she not the most supremacist in being the whitest thing on that side of the Atlantic, but that's not the story that this work tells. The Dud Avocado follows a charming, if blundering, 21-year-old Missouri native, Sally Jay Gorce, who spends two postcollege years sipping Pernod on "la plus belle avenue du monde," the Champs-Élysées; staging William Saroyan and Tennessee Williams with an American theater troupe, and fumbling terribly at love. Sally Jay has a closetful of designer clothes that she bought on sale but always seems to find herself wearing the wrong thing…like a cocktail dress in the daytime or a rumpled, layered schoolgirl look while trying to intimidate a consular officer at the U.

It was autobiographical enough that her husband threatened to divorce her if she wrote a second novel.It's no good even trying to predict what this opposite will be because it always fools you and turns out to be the opposite of that, if you see what I mean. I felt like I was her when I went to university at 19 and had my first taste of freedom - it's exciting the first time you leave home - getting myself into all sorts of trouble, never wanting to slow down, not knowing what I wanted (I still don't), spending all night in bars and clubs and the houses of people I'd just met.

First of all, if you grow incensed with something that was written decades ago because you are judging it by today's standards, don't read this book. Reading their writing, oozing as it does with the constant need for the affirmation of the Right others, whether through amusement, sympathy, pity, or even utilitarian disdain, alongside an almost as strong need to affably dump on, quirkily diss, and politely dehumanize the Wrong others, is not nearly as hard, but lord, now I know where a good portion of the Trump white woman vote is coming from. In a brief afterword, Elaine Dundy explains that 'The Dud Avocado' is semi-autobiographical: All the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did.A change of pace from the doom and gloom of a young (white) woman setting out on her own, I suppose, but lord, she could've at least been less inexorably boring.

She rightly points out that no one reads this novel for the plot and enjoys the details of the heroine’s chaotic life. It wasn't all great, getting carried away in places, but I am not going to pick the bones out of it. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The Dud Avocado is a pseudo-memoir of a naïve American girl, Sally Jay, who travels to Paris in the 1950s. Here is a quick description and cover image of book The Dud Avocado written by Elaine Dundy which was published in 1958–.Larry initially believes the scouts are interested in casting Sally Jay, but quickly learns that they are more interested in Baxter.

Through the haze of late nights and smoke filled rooms it takes a while to figure out Sally Jay is in fact an aspiring actress, trying to break into the business through some associates of hers, She is living in the city of lovers thanks to some loot donated to her precisely for this purpose by her kindly Uncle Roger, who apparently understands her "predilection for being continually on the wing".As a gesture of good will Teddy invites both Sally and Larry to a dinner party where he introduces Larry to the Contessa, his mistress. Elaine Dundy’s semi-autobiographical novel The Dud Avocado, which follows the romantic escapades of Sally Jay Gorce–an irrepressible young woman seeking adventure in ’50s Paris–contains a lot of what makes fiction fun: charm, wit, and devastatingly sharp insights. The novel was a bestseller upon its release and earned acclaim from Groucho Marx, Gore Vidal and Ernest Hemingway. I was tired of her use of dull slang, her constant putting down of herself, her adventures, repetitive in their nature, and of the cynical world in which she is living.