The Dud Avocado

The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living. It is, as The Guardian observes, "one of the best novels about growing up fast." 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 program that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realizes 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?

Elaine Dundy (1921-2008) was born and raised in New York. She worked as an actress in Paris and London, where she met her husband, Kenneth Tynan. After the birth of her first child, she turned to writing. Her first novel, The Dud Avocado (1958), based on the year she spent in Paris, was an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Two more novels, including The Old Man and Me, also published by Virago, and two plays followed. In 1964, divorced from Tynan, she returned to America where she wrote extensively for magazines before moving to Massachusetts where she directed and acted. She is the author of several biographies, including Elvis and Gladys (1985), and an autobiography, Life Itself!