SINGLE GIRLS

A fictionalized account of Helen Gurley Brown’s life and career.

Searles, who worked at Cosmopolitan for 23 years and became friends with its founding editor at the end of her career, opens his novel with a chilling scene in which he has 10-year-old Helen and her sister, Mary Eloine, witness their father’s grisly death in an elevator accident. (In an author’s note, he explains that though Helen wasn’t actually present when this occurred, she felt she “may as well have been,” as it haunted her entire life.) Interleaving exuberantly imagined episodes from Brown’s childhood and coming-of-age in Los Angeles with scenes from her rise to power in the magazine world of New York, Searles has great fun with cliffhanger moments and the literary version of match cuts, where dialogue from one scene bleeds into the next. Helen was working as a copywriter for Max Factor when she met and married film producer David Brown, who was instrumental in encouraging her to write and publish Sex and the Single Girl, a 1962 advice book that sold two million copies in three weeks, a fact he relays to the chauvinist Hearst executive Helen petitions to let her start a magazine. Once installed as the new editor of a long-lived but floundering title, Cosmopolitan, she surrounded herself with a group of creative women and reinvented the publication, pioneering what might be thought of as the earliest version of click-bait with cover stories like “How To Unleash Your Secret Inner Sex Kitten,” “When Husbands Fail as Lovers: A Young Wife’s Frank Report,” and “Anatomy of the Other Woman.” Other real characters in the story include Liz Smith, who was an editor at Cosmo before she started her syndicated gossip column in the mid-1970s, and the photographer Francesco Scavullo, who did the covers of the magazine for decades.

Searles’ affection for the period and his characters infuses the novel with the bright energy of a twirly vintage sundress.