Join us for a moderated conversation with John Searles to celebrate the release of Single Girls!
We’ll enjoy fun beverages and audience giveways.
About Single Girls:
She made being single a movement — now, her story gets its moment.
In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown is fresh off the runaway success of Sex and the Single Girl, her revolutionary call to single women not to rush into marriage on anyone’s timeline but their own—and, 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 the book), and the other half will follow her anywhere. Moved by the thousands of letters arriving at her doorstep from readers desperate for advice, a determined Helen 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.
She quickly assembles a team of smart, savvy “single girls” up for the challenge. Soon, their lives become the stuff of magazine coverlines: the gorgeous Book Editor’s doomed romance with a man she didn’t know was married—and her audacious plan for revenge. The (unofficial!) Sex Editor’s trip to soak in the world’s first champagne-glass hot tub, which goes spectacularly wrong. The Entertainment Editor’s clash with Joan Crawford and her interview with a Park Avenue call girl that leads to unexpected revelations.
SINGLE GIRLS begins at the dawn of Helen’s legendary tenure and journeys back to her youth, envisioning the devastations and people that shaped her into a controversial legend. With dazzling, high-energy prose, Searles captures 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.
John was a longtime Cosmo editor, hired by Helen just out of graduate school, making him the perfect person to capture the spirited and irresistible chaos of her reign. Part love letter to an old friend, part celebration of a bygone-but-still-relevant era, SINGLE GIRLS is a deeper look at a beloved and infamous American pop cultural touchstone in its unforgettable heyday.
John Searles is the best-selling author of the novels Her Last Affair, Help for the Haunted, Strange but True and Boy Still Missing.
Hailed as “riveting” by The New York Times and “hypnotic” by Entertainment Weekly, Boy Still Missing inspired Time magazine to name him a “Person to Watch,” and the New York Daily News to name him a “New Yorker to Watch.” His second novel, Strange but True was praised as “sinister and complex” by Janet Maslin of The New York Times, “extraordinary” by Publishers Weekly, and was named best novel of the year by Salon. Help for the Haunted was named a Boston Globe Best Crime Novel of the Year, an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Must List, and won the American Library Association’s Alex Award. John’s most recent novel, Her Last Affair, was named a Best New Book by People magazine and praised as “a tense, intricately woven tale of heartbreak, retribution and redemption” by Publishers Weekly and “a twisted thriller that explores despair and loneliness with cinematic flair” by Kirkus Reviews.
In 2019, Strange But True was adapted for film by the producers of La La Land and released in theaters nationwide by Lionsgate. Now streaming on HBOMax and Amazon Prime, the film stars the award-winning ensemble cast of Amy Ryan, Greg Kinnear, Brian Cox, Blythe Danner, Nick Robinson and Margaret Qualley. The movie was praised as “suspenseful and haunting” by The Hollywood Reporter and “a twisty tale of tragic secrets” by the Los Angeles Times.
John has appeared regularly on morning programs like NBC’s Today Show, CBS This Morning, Live! With Regis & Kelly, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and CNN to discuss his books.
For 23 years, John was the books editor of Cosmopolitan, also serving as the magazine’s brand director, executive editor, and editor-at-large. His personal and travel essays, book and restaurant reviews have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post and numerous other magazines, newspapers and websites. He has a master’s degree in creative writing from New York University and lives in NYC.
Books will be for sale at this event.
Please register, so we can set the community room up with appropriate seating.