Park Avenue Summer

Just as I am getting used to being a member of AARP and the fact that my doctors are now younger than I am and almost ready to start looking at how to sign up for medicare... another sign that I have crossed an invisible line...  books that cover the 1960s are now considered "historical" fiction.

Renee Rosen mentions in her interviews that she was captivated by episodes of Mad Men which inspired her to find a way to write about that time period.  Listed in the historical fiction genre is Park Avenue Summer, a novel written about Helen Gurley Brown as she takes over the reins of Cosmopolitan magazine.

The year is 1965 and Gurley Brown has just published her book, Sex and the Single Girl, which stirred up quite a bit of excitement among young women.  This is also the time that Betty Freidan has written The Feminine Mystique.  Young women are rethinking marriage and family.  They are realizing they have more power than they thought.  They can work and live on their own.

Alice has come to New York City to fulfill her childhood dream and become a photographer.  Having lost her mother at a young age, she hopes to follow in her footsteps, leaving Ohio for the big city.  Finding an old friend of her mother's as a mentor, she lands a secretarial job in the office of Helen Gurley Brown just as she is about to try and relaunch Cosmo as the new magazine that "her girls" are looking for.  The fictional Alice is there to assist Gurley Brown as she historically goes up against the male executives trying to make Cosmo what she thinks is the new style of magazine young working women are looking for.  With sensual cover photos and evocative articles she is hoping to turn around the failing magazine that has been covering recipes and how to get stains out of clothes.

Mixing fact and fiction we follow Alice, one of the women Brown's audience, as she struggles with the new age of women's mystique, the glamour and sexual appeal, and how she supposed to use it.  As Alice works through her feelings about men, affairs and marriage, she finds her way around New York City and improves her photography skills. 

Quite a fun book to read especially because I was a "Cosmo girl".  Reading Cosmopolitan magazine in my late teens and early twenties, I can picture Helen Gurley Brown leading the way for a generation of women.