REVIEW: Single Girls: A Novel About Helen Gurley Brown and the Women Who Revolutionized Cosmopolitan Magazine in the 1960s by John Searles
An infectious and utterly charming fictionalization of the iconic Helen Gurley Brown’s early years at the helm of Cosmopolitan, and the intrepid group of women she took under her wing to create one of the most talked about magazines of all time.
In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown, a soft spoken, self-professed “mouseburger,” is fresh off the runaway success of her book Sex and the Single Girl, a revolutionary call to single women urging them not to rush into marriage on anyone’s timeline but their own, and, even more radically, to enjoy their sex lives, gloriously free of shame. Upon the book’s publication, half the country is outraged (her mother, for one, hates it), and the other half will follow her anywhere. Moved by the thousands of letters arriving at her doorstep from readers desperate for advice, she marches from one Manhattan magazine conglomerate to another, looking for a perch from which to dispense her unconventional wisdom. At her last stop, she finally gets her shot: just three issues to turn around the flailing magazine Cosmopolitan.
Single Girls begins at the dawn of Helen’s storied tenure and journeys back to her youth, envisioning the devastations and people who forged her into a controversial legend. It imagines the way one unsinkable group of women navigated gender roles and workplace power dynamics long before these issues entered the headlines. With dazzling, high-energy prose, it recreates not just a movement, but a mood: one of ambition, reinvention, and the intoxicating thrill of being young when a new world was possible for a single girl if only she was fearless enough to reach out and grab it.
CW/TW – references to past deaths, references to homophobia and marginalization of people of color, references to cancer, polio, and difficult childhood, misogyny
Dear Mr. Searles,
As I read this book, I wondered what was real and what wasn’t. After reading your Author’s Note, I have a better idea but honestly it’s all written so convincingly and well that I don’t really care where the edges of real, surmised, and authorial license meet.
With skips backwards to her life growing up and then moving forwards through her own Single Girl days, we see what (might have) made Helen Gurley Brown into the woman who took over Cosmopolitan with a deadline of three issues to brush it off and perk up sales or she’s out. Helen is always always looking for her “Single Girls” to see what they’re wearing, what they’re doing, and what they’re interested in. As portrayed in the book, Helen finds a number of just the right women for roles at Cosmo which, after the lard (male writers and hallways full of junk) is tossed, they begin to reimagine.
We see what women of the time were up against in terms of misogyny and the male gaze as well as how HGB and Cosmo were at times castigated from both the left and the right about what messages were being sent to women of the day. Along with this though is the lovely (and I really hope this is true to life) relationship between Helen and her husband David who champions her and her abilities.
The wind-down of the book did seem a little too “bows neatly tied” but the thoughts of Helen and her editors while stuck in an elevator about what people in the future might think of past Cosmo issues is true. I once found some 1970s magazines while cleaning our house for a move and wow, just, … what were we thinking? Still while the lessons of the book land lightly they also hit with a lingering punch.
For a “mouseburger” from Arkansas whose mother told her she wasn’t pretty though, HGB had an outsized impact not only on women of her generation but on us today. B
~Jayne
AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle
COSMO was a regular part of my life in the 1970s & 1980s (yes, I am old!). True, there were lots of aspirational articles (like what to pack when your boyfriend is taking you on a whirlwind impulsive weekend trip to St. Croix) and impossible fashion advice (what jewelry works best with your strapless Givenchy gown), but there were also serious articles about reproductive health, financial planning, political organization, and popular culture. Was it perfect? No. Was there always an underpinning of fat-phobia? Oh my God, yes. But the magazine also opened minds and eyes (and I’m not just talking about Burt Reynolds’s centerfold, lol). Like so many things from the 1970s that have had far-reaching consequences even when long gone (including, perhaps not coincidentally, bodice rippers), COSMO was a mix of good and bad—and I do think the former outweighed the latter.
@DiscoDollyDeb: One thing in the book is that HGB is pushing (at times haranguing might be a better verb) for in depth articles like you mention. As shown in the book, she wanted women of the day to have the information she and her generation weren’t given but had to find on their own. No, I don’t have to get married until I’m ready, yes I’m in charge of my sexuality and I won’t be made to feel ashamed of it, here’s some information about your own body’s functions, and we’re going to have an article about a getaway motel in the Poconos that has a brand new champagne glass shaped jacuzzi. Seriously this part and the couple involved were my favorites.
I really disliked Helen Gurley Brown’s voice in the magazine and elsewhere, sorry to say. She always seemed kind of cold and materialistic to me (I even recall HGB saying in an interview that she loved Madonna’s song “Material Girl” which was about not giving the time of day to men who weren’t rich). I tried Cosmo many times but couldn’t warm to it. The women’s magazine I did like a lot (but this wasn’t until the 1990s, my twenties) was Glamour. It had similar topics and somewhat more affordable clothes. It was probably copying Cosmopolitan’s success but I still liked it better.
On a tangent, I quit reading women’s magazine’s altogether when they started including scented strips in the perfume ads. As soon as I cracked a magazine open, I felt like I was being fumigated. Did anyone else here have a similar experience?
@Janine, with respect to the perfume strips, I enjoyed them because there was no other way in town to know what new scents were like – for aspirational purposes, not actual purchases.
The magazine 17 stopped being interesting to me right as I reached 17 years old, which I’ve always found amusing. Like you, though, my favorite new adult magazine was Glamour. Cosmo was not me and not someone I wanted to become. I miss magazines!
@Janine: @LML: I would have enjoyed perfume strips if they hadn’t been SO intense.
My daughter somehow ended up with a subscription she never requested to a magazine (Vogue?) that is about ninety percent advertisements for upscale products and ten percent content. It most often comes with a perfume ad that I quickly recycle into the bin outdoors…and still the scent lingers!
@Jayne and @Kareni: Yes, the intensity was the problem for me too. I like perfume and wanted to know what the scents were but they were overpowering and I wanted to be able to read without having their intense scents (all the worse for often being at least a few combined scents instead of just one) up my nose.