This is how we're introduced to our heroine, Vivian, who, having been kicked out of Vassar for failing all of her classes, doesn't have anything going for her but her ability to make her Singer sewing machine sing. Aunt Peg's company, which churns out musicals in its raggedy theater, The Lily turns out to need someone who can do costumes, so Vivian finds herself a place there. She quickly becomes enamored of one of the show girls, Celia and adopts her drinking and fucking lifestyle. She makes some other great friends along the way, including a British actress, Edna, who is stranded in the US with her idiot husband because her home in the UK was bombed, leaving them with nothing--other than Edna's prodigious talent and professionalism.

Part of Vivian's idiocy is that she is self-involved, like many teenagers and many people in theater are (I've been both, or rather all three, so I feel comfortable saying that), and that gets her in trouble with pretty much everyone. She is exiled back to her WASPy parents' home upstate, having learned a Valuable Lesson.

I appreciated the self-awareness of the naive character as she narrates the story when she's in her 90s. Her audience is a woman named Angela, whose identity we don't fully learn until close to the end. It's a long book, but it doesn't drag. The device of having a specific audience works well. Gilbert was maligned for her wealthy white woman ways in Eat, Pray, Love, but both are engaging stories of the write-what-you-know variety. 

Here are some of the quotes I highlighted for lols or depth

heard. Another truth

Which, honestly, I'd extend to the entire season of spring. 

^ Accurate observation about youth, which is connected to this statement from adult Vivian

On the 1900s

Have we surpassed that yet? [sob]