This story of a fun-loving gal's year in 1950's Paris is lighthearted but extremely smart and well-written, and not without its moments of poignancy. Simon in Tredynas Days, in May 2018, found that it was best to read the novel in small doses, to appreciate its qualities, like savouring chocolates in a box. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Dying her hair pink, she struts around town in her failed outfits (stubbornly dividing them into three looks: Tyrolean Peasant, Bar Girl, and Dreaded Librarian), she sets out to put the Parisians to shame with her antics. 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.

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.Originally published in 1958, it has gone through countless reprints and still sells successfully today. It is the epitome of literary comfort food - a book I suspect one could come back to every few years just to fall into its delightful charms and forget one's own troubles. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. the dud avocado reads like a witty woman's take on the sun also rises, with the pink-haired protagonist sally jay gorce, an often silly struggling ingenue, going to parties, falling in love, and trying to find herself in paris in the fifties.

A fortnight with Larry, and his girl Missy, and Bax- an Outdoor Boy with few indoor ideas, is dismal- and loses her Jim Breit who had wanted to marry her. Dundy attempted to cure herself of addictions from 1968 to 1976, [3] though according to her daughter, she struggled with drugs and alcohol for half a century. In this pointless pseudo-novel (actually a memoir), which reads like A Moveable Feast crossed with Sex and the City (yet somehow managing to surpass both in banality and narcissism), a young American expatriate in Paris deals with such vital problems as "if I could only figure out if it was Larry I was in love with, or just love" and the worry that she's too much of a stereotypical tourist (and then wondering if her worrying is itself a fulfillment of the stereotype). It had stood, undisturbed (apart from dusting) on the shelves until lockdown, when I began my attempt to read all the ‘tbr’s in my study.It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do.

There were many moments which I enjoyed, especially in the last few sections but there was a long patch in the middle where I kept wanting to just stop reading. Sally Jay is on a learning tour of Europe but she doesn’t really like travel, which is why she’s settled in Paris. But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life.And the last two words of the book are as cryptic and inappropriate and school-girlish as Sally Jay herself. I think we could see her as an early example of that trend that became almost obligatory in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: to find yourself through life’s experiences. I don’t know enough about social behaviours of the time, especially in Paris but I can’t help but think this novel pretty accurate. In October 1993, seven years after Private Eye had pointed out the similarities, Jilly Cooper admitted that sections of her first two novels, Emily and Bella, were plagiarised from The Dud Avocado, but said that it was not deliberate. As things with Jim start to become more serious, Larry reappears in her life, urging her to join him on the Côte d'Argent where Baxter, a Canadian fan of Sally Jay's, and Missy, Baxter's friend and Larry's latest girlfriend, are going for a trip.