Spygirl
True Adventures from My Life as a Private Eye
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
While her friends are making mad cash and getting massages at their dot-com jobs, Amy Gray quits her low-status publishing position to realize her girlhood dream of being a private investigator. Joining a small Manhattan agency, she finds herself plunged into an intriguing world of “con men, lunatics, narcissists, polygamists, sociopaths, felons, petty thieves, and pathological liars”—a description almost as apt for the men in her social life as for her on-the-job subjects. Working with a gang of misfit colleagues (a former zookeeper, a one-time child star, an avant-garde philosopher, and other eccentrics), Amy discovers even more about herself as she detects uncanny parallels between her investigations and her tumultuous love life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"As Spygirl, I could protect my friends, rebuke my enemies, and make the boys love me," proclaims Gray, recalling her recent three-year stint as a Manhattan private investigator. Flawlessly weaving reminiscences of childhood, college days at Brown and the low-paying job as a publishing "slave" she left for her new but decidedly unglamorous career as an agent, Gray's debut hilariously chronicles a roller-coaster love and social life amid the uncertainty of a new millennium. Overshadowing her recollections of the sometimes tedious e-commerce investigations she primarily worked on, while at a small PI firm called The Agency, are the quirky characters she encountered, including a Muslim taxi driver who was enamored of her; a teenaged Korean computer network manager with Tourette's syndrome and an obsession with the cartoon cat Garfield; a sexy drinking buddy who thought she was being stalked by magician David Blaine; and a co-worker with a cyst and the unfortunate appellation Assman. Loaded with Gen-X cultural references, familiar New York landmarks and experiences, and written in a self-deprecating, sometimes sarcastic tone, Gray proves she is "as self-hating as anyone worth knowing" among the artsy 20-something crowd, to which this memoir will probably appeal.
