ABOUT THIS BOOK

Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women's dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or Be Lost Forever. Any thirst for adventure was supposed to be satisfied by the occasional panty raid. Francie and friends, however, find all this hard to swallow, and they resist their appointed futures as elementary school teachers and holders of the precious "MRS" degree. Doing the unthinkable, the three move off campus to live in a house with three men-Liz's boyfriend and two handsome, mysterious Southern twins who fix foreign cars in a shop off campus. There the young women's rebellion against expectations deepens, and they begin the real-world education of pursuing their dreams. Francie yearns to be a writer, and is encouraged by her Russian literature professor. Then she meets Joshua, a talented and dedicated piano student, who presents the ultimate challenge: does she maintain her "virtue," or give in to her sexual desires, finally breaking fully free of repressive "respectability"? Glimmering Girls follows Francie, Liz, and Amanda through this and other discoveries and adventures. Ultimately, each finds a way to live fully at a time when their entire culture seemed arrayed against them.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Merrill Joan Gerber teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology. Her many novels, short-story collections, and non-fiction works include Botticelli Blue Skies, and the prize-winning King of the World and Kingdom of Brooklyn. Her most recent books are Gut Feelings: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions and This Is A Voice From Your Past: New and Selected Stories.

REVIEWS

"As a woman of that period I enjoyed particularly the detailed account of dorm regulations, of surveillance, of two "feet on the floor" rules for evening guests. [Gerber] hasn't forgotten much about what it was like to move into adulthood—sexual and social—in a world so restrictive, fearful, and distrustful of natural impulses."—Janet Burstein, author of Telling the "Little Secrets": American Jewish Writers of the New Wave

"Gerber's fine attention to craft is abundantly evident, from the wonderful pacing of the narrative to her sympathetic and adroit rendering of her independent and intelligent artist-as-a-young-woman protagonist struggling through an era of American life that refuses to extol such qualities in women."—Andrew Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled

"Readers will enjoy Glimmering Girls for its combination of poetry, sexuality, humor, and yearning in a young woman’s life."—Charlotte Zoe Walker, SUNY Oneonta, former NEA creative writing fellow and O. Henry Award winner

TABLE OF CONTENTS

<table of contents, p. v/vii/ix>
Contents
1. Hall Meeting, University of Florida, 1959	000
2. Teachers of Life	000
3. The Land of Love	000
4. Grease Monkeys	000
5. Party Kitchen	000
6. Shellfish	000
7. Pantie Raid	000
8. Fluff	000
9. Sermon	000
10. Letter Home (1)	000
11. Playing House	000
12. By Firelight	000
13. Tosca	000
14. Every Pot has a Cover	000
15. Music of the Spheres	000
16. Letter Home (2)	000
17. The Bench	000
18. La Boheme	000
19. Gynecology	000
20. Collusion	000
21. Peachtree Lake	000
22. Terror	000
23. The Other World	000
24. The Hazel Wood	000
25. Cross Creek	000
26. Purge	000
27. Phi Beta Kappa	000
28. "You Women Have a Habit . . ."	000
29. New York, New York	000
30. Life!	000
31. There's No Stopping Me Now	000
32. Land of Hope and Glory	000