Single Girls

She made being single a movement — now, her story gets its moment.


In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown is fresh off the runaway success of Sex and the Single Girl, her revolutionary call to single women not to rush into marriage on anyone’s timeline but their own—and, more radically, to enjoy their sex lives gloriously free of shame. Upon the book’s publication, half the country is outraged (her mother, for one, hates the book), and the other half will follow her anywhere. Moved by the thousands of letters arriving at her doorstep from readers desperate for advice, a determined Helen marches from one Manhattan magazine conglomerate to another, looking for a perch from which to dispense her unconventional wisdom. At her last stop, she finally gets her shot: just three issues to turn around the flailing magazine Cosmopolitan.

She quickly assembles a team of smart, savvy “single girls” up for the challenge. Soon, their lives become the stuff of magazine coverlines: the gorgeous Book Editor’s doomed romance with a man she didn’t know was married—and her audacious plan for revenge. The (unofficial!) Sex Editor’s trip to soak in the world’s first champagne-glass hot tub, which goes spectacularly wrong. The Entertainment Editor’s clash with Joan Crawford and her interview with a Park Avenue call girl that leads to unexpected revelations.

SINGLE GIRLS begins at the dawn of Helen’s legendary tenure and journeys back to her youth, envisioning the devastations and people that shaped her into a controversial legend. With dazzling, high-energy prose, Searles captures not just a movement but a mood: one of ambition, reinvention, and the intoxicating thrill of being young when a new world was possible for a single girl if only she was fearless enough to reach out and grab it.

John was a longtime Cosmo editor, hired by Helen just out of graduate school, making him the perfect person to capture the spirited and irresistible chaos of her reign. Part love letter to an old friend, part celebration of a bygone-but-still-relevant era, SINGLE GIRLS is a deeper look at a beloved and infamous American pop cultural touchstone in its unforgettable heyday.