One of the great pleasures of City of Girls is that it takes women seriously - women whose lives might otherwise be passed over for being too frivolous, on the one hand, or too transgressive, on the other. It’s her New York book, an ode to the “mirrored skyscrapers, neon signs, and shining wet streets” of the city as it teeters on the edge of World War II, a love song to the entrancing chaos of Times Square, with “mountains of artificial lights” that “spewed out their lava of white-hot news and instant advertising.” It seems to me the bob of a woman who has spent the last six years immersed in a novel about the theater world of 1940s New York, which she has.Ĭity of Girls is Gilbert’s third novel and eighth book. It’s no longer the blonde, Meg Ryan–esque tangle immortalized on the back flap of 2006’s Eat, Pray, Love, but a sleek and angular bob that Gilbert ruffles and parts periodically as she speaks. Gilbert is tall, but she swoops down and embraces me firmly, though we’ve never met, and almost immediately compliments my bangs. “In the months after Rayya died, I would just hit shuffle on one of her playlists and be like, babe, you pick it, and then I would dance to one of her songs.” “I can still see her face, still see that Oh, I’m dying and we can dance,” says Gilbert. I just remember her looking at me, and she just started smiling, and she was like, ‘Well, we might as well just dance.’”Įlias, a musician, filmmaker, and author of Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk, From the Middle East to the Lower East Side, seems to be on Gilbert’s mind that day. “We’d been crying a lot, and some David Bowie came on.
“I have this beautiful memory from when right after Rayya was diagnosed,” Gilbert says. But the dancing? That started as a way to cope with the loss of her partner, Rayya Elias, who died in 2018 of pancreatic and liver cancer, at age 57. Over the last year, movement has been an important way for Gilbert to break herself free of this mindset. “Most people like us,” she gestures to me, so I assume she means writers more generally, “think of our bodies as a broomstick that carries our brain jar around.” “I do a lot of weird shit on my own,” she tells me with a laugh.
Gilbert dances with the loosey-goosey, arms-akimbo, leaving-everything-out-on-the-floor abandon you discover when you’re dancing in a room by yourself to Motown. Not the graceful steps she might have retained from a childhood ballet class, which she assures me she never took. Elizabeth Gilbert has recently taken up dancing.
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