“You will never be an interesting person,” the glamorous, accomplished, 50-something theater actress Edna Parker Watson calmly says to Vivian, the protagonist and narrator of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new World War II–era novel, City of Girls. “I’m telling you this …” she goes on, “because I believe you’ve been laboring under the misconception that you are interesting or that your life has significance. But you are not and it doesn’t.”
