There’s an effervescence in Elizabeth Gilbert’s joyful new novel, City of Girls, that belies the circumstances of its completion.

“This is the book that I wrote in grief,” says Gilbert, whose personal life became a source of worldwide interest with the 2006 publication of her No. 1 New York Times bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Ensuing years brought fame, fortune, and an augmented bibliography: She has published a sequel memoir(Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage), a critically acclaimed bestselling novel (The Signature of All Things), and a self-help book for creatives (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear).She also had a profound romance with best friend Rayya Elias, a writer, musician, and filmmaker who became Gilbert’s partner soon after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the spring of 2016.

“I had been working on [City of Girls] for three years before Rayya got sick,” Gilbert tells Kirkus, “and from the minute she got sick, I could not begin to care about it. I just couldn’t imagine me caring about it, anyone ever caring about it, it mattering in any way whatsoever. I didn’t look at it for the entire 18 months that she was dying. And it just seemed like such an impossible thing to revisit.

“But somehow, within a few weeks after her death,” in the winter of 2018, she says, “I got some kind of a message from the mothership—and it might have been Rayya—that said, This is the way out. And it just seemed so incongruous” to write fiction, which she considers an essentially joyful act, while she was deep in sorrow. “But ultimately, that’s what the book is about. It’s about saying yes to your entire life, to every single bit of it. To the shame and the loss and the nostalgia and the beauty.”

Set primarily in dazzling 1940s New York, City of Girls is the frolicsome tale of a woman who says yes to her entire life. Vivian Morris is 19 years old in the summer of 1940, freshly expelled from Vassar College after a lackluster freshman year, when her Connecticut blue-blood parents send her to live with eccentric Aunt Peg, owner of a downtrodden yet divine Art Nouveau theater in midtown Manhattan. In a blink, Vivian’s life goes from circumscribed to swirling, chockablock with showgirls and artists and cocktails and banter and fashion and sex.

Gilbert writes in Vivian’s voice:

My longing for excitement and my curiosity about sex made me not only insatiable that summer, but also susceptible. That’s how I see myself, when I look back on it now. I was susceptible to everything that had even the vaguest suggestion of the erotic or the illicit. I was susceptible to neon lights in the darkness of a midtown side street. I was susceptible to drinking cocktails out of coconut shells in the Hawaiian Room of the Hotel Lexington. I was susceptible to being offered ringside tickets, or backstage entrances to nightclubs that did not have names. I was susceptible to anybody who could play a musical instrument, or dance with a fair amount of panache. I was susceptible to getting into cars with just about anyone who owned a car. I was susceptible to men who would approach me at the bar with two highballs saying, “I seem to have found myself with an extra drink. Perhaps you could help me out with this, miss?”

Unlike most female libertines in literature, whose “wanton ways” inevitably lead to punishment and ruination, Vivian, who tells the story of her sexual awakening from the vantage of old age, looks back on her life with pleasure for her adventures and tenderness for her missteps.

“At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time,” Gilbert writes. “After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”

Vivian Morris is the kind of woman who eats life with a big spoon and the kind of character readers will never forget. “Jammed with terrific characters, gorgeous clothing, great one-liners, convincing wartime atmosphere, and excellent descriptions of sex,” Kirkus writes in a starred review, City of Girls is a novel “which can only be described (in Vivian's signature italics) as transcendent. There are still many readers who know Gilbert only as a memoirist. Whatever Eat, Pray, Love did or did not do for you, please don't miss out on her wonderful novels any longer. A big old banana split of a book, surely the cure for what ails you.”

“Part of writing this book is wanting to honor girls like me,” says Gilbert, who calls the passage regarding Vivian’s susceptibility to New York’s charms “pure memoir.” “There’s a certain kind of a girl who just wants all of that, and wants all of that very young, and wants a lot of it, and is much more curious than she is afraid.

“There’s force in girls and women at certain times in their lives, a desire that has its own muscle to it, where it goes out in search of the thing that it wants,” she says. “And it says, I’m going to take that because I want that. It doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea, and it doesn’t mean that it’s without consequence, and it doesn’t mean that it’s not risky. It just means that let’s not forget that women also are agents of desire sometimes and not just there to consent or not consent. I also wanted to tell that story.”

Megan Labrise is the editor at large and co-host of Kirkus’ Fully Booked podcast.