'The Dud Avocado'

One of Elaine Dundy's best-known books was "The Dud Avocado," first published in 1958 and reissued in 2007 by New York Review Books. The semiautobiographical story is about a young woman who comes of age in the 1950s through a series of decadent misadventures in Paris.

An excerpt from the beginning of the book:

It was a hot, peaceful, optimistic sort of day in September. It was around 11 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 a voice bellowed into my ear: "Sally Jay Gorce! What the hell? Well, for Christ's sake, can this really be our own little Sally Jay Gorce?" I felt a hand ruffling my hair and I swung around, furious at being so rudely awakened.

Who should be standing there in front of me, in what I immediately spotted as the Left Bank uniform of the day, dark wool shirt and a pair of old Army suntans, but my old friend Larry Keevil. He was staring down at me with some alarm.

I said hello to him and added that he had frightened me, to cover any bad-tempered expression that might have been lingering on my face, but he just kept on staring dumbly at me.

"What have you been up to since ... since ... when the hell was it that I last saw you?" he asked finally.

Curiously enough I remembered exactly.

"It was just a week after I got here. The middle of June."

He kept on looking at me, or rather he kept on looking over me in that surprised way, and then he shook his head and said,

"Christ, Gorce, can it only be three short months?" Then he grinned. "You've really flung yourself into this, haven't you?" In a way it was exactly what I had been thinking, too, and I was on the point of saying, "Into what?" Very innocently, you know, so that he could tell me how different I was, how much I'd changed and so forth, but all at once something stopped me. I knew I would have died rather than hear his reply.

So instead I said, "Ah well, don't we all?" which was my stock phrase when I couldn't think of anything else to say. There was a pause and then he asked me how I was and I said fine how was he, and he said fine, and I asked him what he was doing, and he said it would take too long to tell.

It was then we both noticed we were standing right across the street from the Cafe Dupont, the one near the Sorbonne.