City of girls - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Life is both fleeting and dangerous, and there is no point in denying yourself pleasure, or being anything other than what you are."

It is the summer of 1940. Nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris arrives in New York with her suitcase and sewing machine, exiled by her despairing parents. Although her quicksilver talents with a needle have been deemed insufficient for her to pass into her sophomore year of Vassar, she soon finds gainful employment as the self-appointed seamstress at the Lily Playhouse, her Aunt Peg’s charmingly disreputable revue theatre. There, Vivian becomes the toast of the showgirls, transforming the trash and clutter not only of the theatre seats into creations for goddesses. Here in this strange wartime city of girls, Vivian and her girlfriends mean to drink the heady highball of life itself to the last drop. But there are hard lessons to be learned, and bitterly regrettable mistakes to be made. Vivian sees that to live the life that she wants, she must live many lives, ceaselessly and ingeniously making them new.