Spygirl: True Adventures from My Life as a Private Eye [Paperback]

Amy Gray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

Review

“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

"A funny, clever, deftly-written romp through the world of a real-life Charlie's angel."
-Molly Jong-Fast, author of Normal Girl

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Villard; Advance Uncorrected Proof edition (September 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812971523
• ISBN-13: 978-0812971521
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,793,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cool Chix, September 22, 2003

By 

Hans Van De Wegh (Jersey City, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spygirl: True Adventures from My Life as a Private Eye (Paperback)

A good read. The author's subtle sense of humor made the book. Her recounting of her personal life was actually much more interesting than the PI stuff. It was full of cool chix doing their thing in NYC with attitude. I liked that Cassie character.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars i wish i had written it myself...., October 1, 2003

By 

Elissa Hanigan (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spygirl: True Adventures from My Life as a Private Eye (Paperback)

Amy Gray is like a younger, female Woody Allen. She really gets it. She's captured that peculiar sorrow of living lonely in New York, with raw laugh-out-loud-funny dialog (much of it of the four letter kind) that had tears running down my face. (I live in a different big city on a western coast but grew up in NYC) I must admit the book flagged bit in the middle as the cases got a bit slow, but Gray's crackling dialogue and lovable/slighty demented characters serve well and deliver a very sweet moment in the end, for the characters and the reader.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riotous fun, October 28, 2003

By 

"kb430" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spygirl: True Adventures from My Life as a Private Eye (Paperback)

This is truly a delightful novel. It is original and helps fill a gap in literature for young women's truthful voices. Gray really gets inside the psyche of the curious, independent woman in New York on a quest for answers; whether in her personal or her professional life. Gray's hilarious account of her years as a P.I. and the ridiculously colorful characters kept me glued to my couch turning pages the whole way through.
The narrative structure of this novel was fascinating and held together the various threads of the story that focuses mostly on Gray's current social life and current work projects. The images her prose evokes are crisp, vivid and bright. Amy also illustrates a pack of questionable men she keeps running into en route to finding a compatible boyfriend with light-hearted humor even as she reveals her disappointment in making yet another mistake in becoming involved. Her stories are funny, frightening and all too familiar to women of her generation. Gray deftly weaves snippets of her past that led to her present and does quick yet evocative sketches of many influences in her life. This novel is a lot of fun, superbly written and not to be missed.