Wild Girls

Three college friends from the 50s blaze their own path in love and work, braving the stifling conventions of the age, and anticipating the social thaw that would arrive ten years later. These ';wild girls' pay heavy penalties for living against the grain, but, over the years, rebound and re-set their course, drawing strength from their friendship. The novel follows them from an elite northeastern college, to Paris with Allen Ginsberg, to New York's avant-garde scene in the early sixties, to a mansion in Newport, to the slopes of Zermatt, to Long Island's Gold Coast, as it celebrates the nimbleness and vitality of women who defied an entire culture to forge their own journey.Wild Girls is a novel about a few women rebels who came of age in the 50s with the Beats in Paris, Allen Ginsberg (when he was still sleeping with girls), and a Yoko Ono-based character in early 60s New York. More importantly, Erica Abeel IS a Wild Girl--she lived the life, these are her friends, and this is an insiders peek into that world.Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich AsiansPraise for Abeels Women Like Us:Smart, snappy, and compulsively readable ... Written with wit and perception.Publishers WeeklyAn old-fashioned good read.New York Times Book ReviewIt's six A.M. in a Paris just coming awake and shes about to climb to the room of Allen Ginsberg. She pushes open the door of the Beat Hotel, its squawk denting the morning stillness. No sign of the concierge. Too early maybe? In the ancient, dank stairwell she's driven back by odors -- from sinks on the landings doubling as pissoirs, ';Turkish traps' on little rises off the steps, last night's cooking cut with sweet ghosts of grass all of it finished with a grandaddy note that might be rising from cisterns beneath Paris, maybe from the goddamn Romans. Breathing through her mouth, she cranes up at a nautilus of stairs spiraling to a skylight. Hard to imagine Puccini's honey-throated Bohemians here.