Elaine Dundy - The Dud Avocado

First published in 1958, this tells the fun adventures of a young American women in Paris. 

Sally Jay Gorce is our heroine, and she behaves as you might expect a rebellious woman associating with bohemian types to behave. This novel is pretty relatable, and I have to admit I did not see the plot conclusion coming! 

There are some nice lines I noticed:

A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable. 

.....

I was still wearing the evening dress I had on when I met Larry that morning and the funny thing about it  was that, even thought twelve hours had elapsed since then, it still wasn't particualry appropriate, I mean I really felt I could expect it to be correct attire at some point of the day - like a watch that has stopped, eventually just happening to have its hands pointing to the right time. I can't understand it. I have quite a lot of clothes and go to quite a lot of places. I never actually seem to be wearing the right things at the right time, though. You'd think the law of averages... Oh well. It's all very discouraging. 

......

With these words ringing in my ears as I felt my way down the stairs, too distracted to find the minuteries, I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be  a Woman in these times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century. 

.....

Dodi shifted her invisible knitting with a little frown of concentration; she seemed to have dropped a stitch. 

...

The waiters at the Select comported themselves with that sightly theatrical mixture of charm, complicity and contempt that one would expect from servants in Hell. All you had to do was sit there at the beginning of an evening, feeling pristine an crisp, combed and scented, and order your very first drink (it could be something as innocent as a lemonade), for them to indicate by the slightest flicker of their merry eyes that they were aware as you that you were taking the fatal step down the road to ruin. By merely clattering up the used cups and saucers on to their trays, flicking their napkins over the table, the better to clear the stage for disaster, and repeating your order precisely as given,  they could predict for you the whole miracle that was going to take place four hours later when you - the now transformed, tousled shiny, vague-eyed you - would emerge, talking the most utter balderdash, spiling beans of shattering truths or equally shattering lies, singing with friends, fighting with strangers, promising favours, promising love, scrambling into bed and clambering our again...all this they could predict for you as relentlessly as any Delphic Oracle, while at the same time it all struck them so irresistibly funny they couldn't help cackling.  

...

It was four o'clock in the morning and the night had fallen to pieces around us. 

.......

I always expect people to behave better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous. 

....

I backed away from him into a cluster consisting of a very famous musical-theatre actor called Rollo, a skinny old woman covered in ornaments and got up rather like a hysterical Christmas tree, and a superbly dressed, superbly indolent, superbly at home young man who was beginning, I noticed, superbly to get on Rollo's nerves. I an evening of 'firsts' I may as well mention that it was also the first Australian I had ever met. 

'I think she behaved disgracefully,' complained the Australian. 'I said it to her back and I'll say it to her face.'

'I don't know which is which, ' snapped Rollo. 

....

I wanted to cry; I couldn't think why I wasn't. The unfairness of it all. What had i done anyway? I sat on, propped up on the table, staring blankly at nothing, like one of those Absinthe Drinkers. I noticed my elbows and arms were caked with dirt from all the dirty tables I'd been sitting at, and my hands black for all the dirty people I'd been meeting. I felt myself kind of slipping away.

...

I found that I liked acting and that, after those first few terrifying minutes each night before I went on stage, I was really enjoying myself. I even liked always having to be at the same place at the same time. I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.   

...

It was just at the time (and it may still be, for all I know), when the Aubergine, or Fired Egg-Plant school of cooking was getting such a grip on beginners' cuisine, and I remember very few dinners without that harmless but insipid vegetable staring up at me form the main dish, often quite unadorned except for a sliver of melted cheese on top.

...

For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly, Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trans make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the critical dismay with which I first greet the sight of new places.