Books like City of Girls

Taylor Jenkins Reid's oral-history novel follows the rise and implosion of a fictional 1970s rock band, with Daisy Jones at its center: a singer whose talent and beauty make her magnetic and whose appetites make her dangerous. Like City of Girls, this is a novel about a woman who refuses to shrink herself for anyone else's comfort.

Both books are set in glamorous, male-dominated entertainment worlds, and both treat female desire as a legitimate force rather than a moral failing. Reid and Gilbert share a warmth toward their protagonists that never tips into sentimentality.

Daisy's refusal to play by the rules echoes Vivian's approach to 1940s New York, and both characters pay real costs for their freedom without being punished by the narrative. The oral-history format gives Daisy Jones a snappy, fast rhythm that contrasts with Gilbert's more reflective first-person narration, but both books leave you wanting to have a drink with their heroines.

Evelyn Hugo is a Cuban-American movie star who spent decades manipulating the Hollywood machine, marrying strategically, and hiding her true self from the public. Taylor Jenkins Reid structures her confession as an interview, letting Evelyn control the narrative the same way she controlled her career. Like City of Girls, this novel centers a woman who uses beauty and intelligence as tools in a world designed to exploit both.

Vivian and Evelyn are separated by decades and social class, but they share an understanding that the rules governing women's behavior exist to be bent. Reid writes with more plot-driven urgency than Gilbert, building toward an ending that gives every chapter before it a different weight, while Gilbert lets meaning accumulate gradually. Both novels argue that a woman's sexual history does not define her moral character, and both give their heroines the dignity of old age and retrospection.

This pairs with City of Girls for readers who want another woman's life story told without shame.

Set during one epic house party in 1983 Malibu, Taylor Jenkins Reid's Malibu Rising follows the four Riva siblings as their famous father's legacy threatens to swallow them whole. Like City of Girls, the novel is built on a specific time and place rendered so vividly it becomes a character: 1940s Manhattan for Gilbert, 1980s Malibu for Reid.

Both books use their settings to examine how women navigate worlds shaped by powerful men, and both let their female characters claim space through sex, art, and stubborn self-possession. Reid writes with a propulsive energy that differs from Gilbert's more languid pacing, packing multiple lifetimes of drama into a single night.

The family dynamics add a dimension that City of Girls approaches differently through Vivian's chosen family at the Lily Playhouse. Readers who loved the sun-soaked, period-specific glamour of City of Girls will find the same atmospheric pleasure here, turned up louder and set to a different decade's soundtrack.

Fitzgerald's novel about Jay Gatsby's doomed pursuit of Daisy Buchanan shares City of Girls' fascination with a specific American moment when excess and idealism collided. Both books are narrated by observers pulled into worlds more glamorous and destructive than their own: Nick Carraway watches the rich destroy themselves on Long Island; Vivian watches showgirls blaze through wartime Manhattan.

The two novels treat their party scenes as both spectacle and elegy, celebrations that carry the shadow of loss. Fitzgerald writes with compressed, lyrical precision where Gilbert uses a more expansive, conversational voice, but both achieve the same effect of making a vanished era feel tactile and present.

The Great Gatsby is darker in its conclusions than City of Girls, offering no redemption through wisdom, but both books understand that the pursuit of pleasure in America is always tangled up with class, ambition, and the stories we tell about who deserves what.

Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins bounces between a crumbling Italian coastal village in 1962 and modern-day Hollywood, following the ripple effects of a brief encounter between a dying actress and a young Italian innkeeper. Like City of Girls, it is a novel about what happens to people on the fringes of the entertainment industry, the ones who are close enough to the spotlight to be burned by it.

Both books use romance as a lens for examining larger questions about art, fame, and the choices women make inside industries that treat them as decorative. Walter writes with more structural complexity than Gilbert, jumping between timelines and locations, but both share a fundamental generosity toward their characters.

Beautiful Ruins and City of Girls both argue that the most interesting lives are the ones lived slightly off-script, by people who never quite became what they were supposed to be.

Lauren Groff tells the story of a marriage from two radically different angles: first through the husband's perspective, then through the wife's, revealing how completely two people can misunderstand their own relationship. Like City of Girls, Fates and Furies is a novel about performance, the roles people play for each other and the truths they hide behind those roles.

Vivian performs for 1940s New York; Groff's characters perform for each other across decades. Both books are interested in the gap between a woman's public presentation and her private reality, and both treat that gap with intelligence rather than judgment.

Groff writes with more density and literary ambition than Gilbert, packing every sentence with double meanings, but both authors share an interest in how women build lives inside structures they did not design. This pairs with City of Girls for readers who want the same themes of marriage, art, and female secrecy delivered with more structural experimentation.

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner follows Amir, a boy from Kabul who carries guilt about a childhood betrayal across decades and continents. This might seem like an unlikely pairing with City of Girls, but both novels share a deeper structural connection: they are stories told by older narrators looking back on defining moments of cowardice and courage, trying to make sense of who they became.

Vivian's retrospective narration carries the same weight of accumulated wisdom and regret that Amir brings to his story. Both books ask whether a single terrible choice can define a life, and both ultimately argue that redemption is possible but never clean.

Hosseini writes with more emotional intensity and less humor than Gilbert, and the cultural contexts could not be more different. But readers who responded to City of Girls' treatment of shame, forgiveness, and the long view of a life will find those same themes handled with equal care here.