The Dud Avocado (Virago Modern Classics) [Paperback]

**'A champagne cocktail ... Rich, invigorating, and deceptively simple to the taste ... One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence (OBSERVER )

** 'A carbonated first novel that will set male readers to thinking sheepishly of plain wrappers (TIME MAGAZINE )

** 'As delightful and delicate an examination of how it is to be twenty and in love and in Paris as I've ever read (SUNDAY TIMES )

** 'Scandalous and entertaining ... Both funny and true (EVENING STANDARD )

'A carbonated first novel that will set male readers to thinking sheepishly of plain wrappers'

'Scandalous and entertaining ... Both funny and true'

* Hugely entertaining novel of sex, lies and Americans in Paris * Dripping with the sarcasm those Americans are not supposed to have

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 programme that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realises 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?

This novel has a special place in my heart. It was my first novel and because of the warmth of its reception over the years, it has become a dearly beloved child to me.I remember so well how I actually began writing it: One morning I opened a notebook and wrote: "I was walking down the street one day when suddenly-" A good beginning, I thought: I'm setting Sally Jay up for all hell to break loose. But what street was she walking down? As the street grew clearer, I saw it was in Paris. It was a boulevard. And some months later, that first sentence finally became "It was a hot, peaceful optimistic sort of day in September. It was about eleven in the morning I remember and I was drifting down the Boulevard St. Michel thoughts rising in my head like little puffs of smoke when suddenly…" And I had to figure out - suddenly what? Somebody stops Sally Jay, of course. The man she will fall in love with? Undecided. Sally Jay is an actress and Larry who stops her is an actor and they already know each other and they go to a café when suddenly again-what? She sees her lover, an Italian Diplomat…." And I was off.

The only person I really knew anything about for starters was the "I" of the story; of the rest of the characters and the plot I had only the vaguest idea. But I knew Sally Jay was wearing an evening dress mid-day walking down that boulevard because I, myself, had worn an evening dress for a couple of days in Paris mid-day before I managed to get to the cleaners to retrieve the rest of my clothes. Of the various things that happen to Sally Jay, some had also happened to me. I must add, however, that often when I got stuck I would say to myself, "What would I not do?" And then have Sally Jay do it; and I would be off again.

What did happen to both Sally Jay and myself was discovering that famous Parisian boulevard, the Champs Elysees. My initial response to it came out pretty much the way my heroine's did when first she viewed it.
All at once I found myself standing there gazing down that enchanted Boulevard in the blue, blue evening. Here was all the gaiety, glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it. I began floating down those Elysian Fields three inches off the ground as easily as a Cocteau character floats through Hell. Luxury and order seemed to be shining from every street lamp along the Boulevard, shining from every window of its toy-shops and dress-shops, its cafes and cinemas and theatres; from its bonbonneries and parfumeries and nighteries. Talk about seeing Eternity in a Grain of Sand and Heaven in a Wild Flower, I really think I was having some sort of mystic revelation then…"
Only what happened in real time was that when I first started "gazing down that enchanted boulevard" I was dismayed at the way it looked. Grim. Dark. Unintersting. Then I saw a street sign indicating I was not on the Champs Elysees. I was on the wrong boulevard. So I re-traced my footsteps took the correct turning and floated into the epiphany as quoted in the previous paragraph.

It was around then, in Paris, that I became aware of something about myself only previously suspected. I had an alter ego, a second self, a not so ghostly increasingly intrusive highly comic character whom I had to acknowledge. In fact whose presence I could no longer deny. I had to accept her, had to give her space, for she would pop up getting things wrong when I least expected her to.

When the book was finished and sold to an excellent publisher, in its five months before publication I found myself embarking on what I still believe to be the smoothest, fastest, most exhilarating ride anyone has ever taken from novice to novelist. I had an excellent editor; and excellent agent; foreign rights were quickly sold; excerpts of it landed in the glossy magazines. One Sunday morning I woke up to the most blissful reviews imaginable. With success came wonderful, funny and exciting new friends - friends that would last a lifetime. I would never be the same again.

Elaine Dundy was born and raised in New York. As an actress, she worked in Paris and London, where she met her husband, the late Kenneth Tynan. THE DUD AVOCADO was her semi-autobiographical first novel, based on the year she spent in Paris. She died in April 2008.