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Spygirl: True Adventures from My Life as a Private Eye by Amy Gray Paperback U*sed Very Good Shape
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From Booklist
Anxious to trade the "corporate hell" of a low-paying publishing job for greater adventure, Gray, a twentysomething New Yorker, takes a job as a private investigator. In this Sex in the City sleuthing memoir, Gray shifts between days researching crooks with her raunchy, oddball colleagues and evenings in hipster bars searching for some semblance of love. Readers expecting suspenseful, tightly woven detective stories will be disappointed; much of Gray's account of her job focuses on the competitive, paper-shuffling tedium and bizarre office personalities. She also tries for a deeper exploration of the human desire for truth that results in some self-conscious insertions of social theory and overblown prose. But her voice is brash, smart, stylish, yearning, and very funny, and in anecdotes filled with revealing dialogue and sharp observation, she captures what it's like to be young, talented, overly educated, underpaid, and single in New York. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
"Either Amy Gray has had an extraordinary life, or she has an extraordinary imagination. She reveals the slightly sordid life of a contemporary sleuth; she gets under the skin of the dating game; and she nails office politics. Spygirl is cool and it packs a punch."
-Rebecca Campbell, author of Slave to Fashion
"A funny, clever, deftly-written romp through the world of a real-life Charlie's angel."
-Molly Jong-Fast, author of Normal Girl
"Either Amy Gray has had an extraordinary life, or she has an extraordinary imagination. She reveals the slightly sordid life of a contemporary sleuth; she gets under the skin of the dating game; and she nails office politics. Spygirl is cool and it packs a punch."
-Rebecca Campbell, author of Slave to Fashion
"A funny, clever, deftly-written romp through the world of a real-life Charlie's angel."
-Molly Jong-Fast, author of Normal Girl
Product 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.
Inside Flap Copy
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.
From the Back Cover
“Amy Gray's Spygirl is a ‘girl meets city’ love story, a must-read for all the overeducated youth who believe if they can make it there, etc. Amy is a real modern-day heroine, willing to take risks in both her personal and professional life, to put up with the rats she finds both in her office as a private investigator and in the New York City bar scene. You'll find yourself rooting for her on every page.”
-Kathryn Larrabee, author of An Everyday Savior
“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.”
-Publishers Weekly
"Either Amy Gray has had an extraordinary life, or she has an extraordinary imagination. She reveals the slightly sordid life of a contemporary sleuth; she gets under the skin of the dating game; and she nails office politics. Spygirl is cool and it packs a punch."
-Rebecca Campbell, author of Slave to Fashion
About the Author
Amy Gray spent three years working as a private investigator in Manhattan. She has been profiled in W magazine, The New York Times, and Glamour, among other publications. She lives in New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
Everyday life is the greatest detective story ever written. Every second, without noticing, we pass by thousands of corpses and crimes. —Franz Kafka
This is written on the wall in the stairwell of my new office building. It’s my first day at work, but instead of thinking about that I’m thinking about this comment. “Who are these broke-ass bitches?” I’m thinking about those broke-ass bitches, and won- dering who’s spending money on them and pissed off about it when I see a two-hundred-or-so-pound guy storming down the stairwell at me. Close up, his face is red and scarred-looking. Rivulets of busted blood vessels spread all around his nose and chin, even in his eyes, which look like they’re crying red, and tributaries seem to be spreading down the creases in his face to his gullet. I duck down into the corner of the winding stairs below more graffiti written in blood-colored ink that says stranger things have happened.
“Unlikely,” I say out loud.
I had arrived on the first morning of my first day in a close-fitting Italian gray flannel suit that hadn’t fit well since I’d bought it on sale at Daffy’s two years earlier. Being nervous is an excellent diet. In the last several weeks I’d lost the five or six pounds that I’d accumulated since the last time I was this nervous.
I’d spent fifteen minutes in the lobby of my new building, pushing the up arrow on the elevator until Tommy the Building Super and All-Around Troubleshooter came and got me. It was 8:50 a.m. No one else was at work yet.
“It ain’t working. Follow me, sweetheart.” Tommy winked and led me outside, across an icy sidewalk, where we reentered on the other side of the building. He pulled on a huge steel arm to open the service elevator. Nothing happened. A few more tugs on the cargo winch yielded nothing, so he took me back past the elevator and unlocked the stairwell. “Go on up, honey.” The office was on the fifth floor. As far as stairwells go, this one was particularly rank-smelling and sketchy. Years of people taking pisses and treacherous flights down these stairs had left a sticky patina on the wood floors. After the red-faced bull of a guy blazes past, I sit down on the stairs to catch my breath.
I realize my Starbucks latte is sideways across my Italian wool–wrapped lap. From a few floors above me, I hear what sounds like the approach of another desperate character. The sound grows louder. Boom. Thud. Crack. “Mutherfucker” muttered. Boom, boom, boom. BOOM!
Bounding past me, red-faced, is my new boss, George, holding a baseball bat, wearing no shirt, and Tevas. He jumps over the five steps I’m sitting on and keeps on going. “Hey, Gray,” he mutters on his way down. Following him down minutes later are Evan, Gus, and Wendy. They are investigators in my new office. They’re all out of breath and grayish-looking. Everyone else is late for work; as I later learn, they always are. “You picked a great first day,” Evan says, smiling.
“What’s going on?” I demand, standing up as my empty latte cup primly rolls off my lap and down the stairs. Was this the disgruntled subject of an investigation come to exact revenge? What had I done with myself?
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