The Cigarette Girl

A furiously funny, clear-eyed novel about a non-bimbo's dating adventures in a town that celebrates bimbosity. Elizabeth West is twenty-eight, which means she's just entered The Zone--that seven-year span in a woman's life when the pressure to find Mr. Right is at its most intense. For Elizabeth, however, the quest is not about Mr. Right so much as it is about Mr. Maybe. And on some nights, all she's looking for is a little distraction . . . What complicates Elizabeth's quest are the particulars of her situation. She is a writer of testosterone-heavy screenplays--the blow-'em-up vehicles for eight-figure stars and their bad-boy directors--and therefore deals on a daily basis with men who traffic nearly exclusively in bimbos, which, like smog and palm trees, are a fixture of the L.A. landscape. Though her job requires her to sound like one of the boys (sample dialogue: "I don't deal with dickbrains"), she's very much a girl, from her cell-phone codependency to her chronic attraction to dangerous men. With her female friends succumbing to marriage or morphing into Spermtrappers (women who hunger to be impregnated--husband optional), Elizabeth finds herself questioning the long-term benefits of remaining an SCU (self-contained unit) and looking with new eyes at the mating options around her.