Best-selling author John Searles visited the East Meadow Public Library on Tuesday Aug. 11 to discuss his new book “Single Girls.”
The novel tracks Helen Gurley Brown as she tries to sell her idea of FEMME: For the Woman on Her Own, to several publishers across New York City, to finally being offered editorial status over a dying publication at Hearst Magazines and transforming it into the Cosmopolitan magazine the world knows today.
“I hope when people are reading the book, first I hope they have fun because it is a very fun, joyful book,” said Searles who’s just written his first dramatic fiction novel with “Single Girls.” “But underneath…you see the seriousness of what was going on for women and women's rights in the 60’s.”
As a longtime Cosmo editor, Searles was to learn firsthand who Gurley Brown was and what made her special.
“She called herself a mouse burger…like a mousy woman of no means, but through sheer tenacity could achieve success,” he said.
As the son of a truck driver, Searles found himself drawn to her scrappiness, savvyness and extreme intelligence that inevitably propelled her to be the one to change the way men and women thought about the rights of women.
“Because although the things she had to say might sound basic now, the things she wrote about in that book were not so basic at the time,” said Searles about Gurley Brown’s earlier work, a book titled “Sex and Single Girl.”
Gurley Brown’s Cosmo was ahead of its time for speaking to women about how to get a divorce and how “you couldn’t google that as a woman in 1965,” Searles mentioned in an interview with CBS News New York.
Cosmopolitan’s historic rise during Gurley Brown’s reign as editor of Cosmopolitan is a landmark for the women’s rights movement as we know it today.
”I hope that there's a resonance, and they see the connection to what's going on today with women's rights, and then also they realize how the previous generation fought so hard for the rights that so many people have today,” Searles said, speaking towards the progress women have achieved in acquiring individual freedoms since the 60’s.
Searles writes not only to remind his readers of the greatness women can achieve when they display a tenacity for their dreams but also as a tribute to his friend and former boss, the late Helen Gurley Brown who had it not been for her daring charisma to challenge the status quo so many women and young teens would not have the famed Cosmo quiz nor the editorial advice that continues to lift the hearts and minds of women across the country and all over the world.
