Single Girls

by John Searles

An infectious and utterly charming fictionalization of the iconic Helen Gurley Brown’s early years at the helm of Cosmopolitan , and the intrepid group of women she took under her wing to create one of the most talked about magazines of all time.

In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown, a soft spoken, self-professed “mouseburger,” is fresh off the runaway success of her book Sex and the Single Girl, a revolutionary call to single women urging them not to rush into marriage on anyone’s timeline but their own, and, even 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, she 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 just three issues to turn around the flailing magazine Cosmopolitan.

Helen quickly assembles a team of smart, savvy single girls up to the task. Soon, their lives become the stuff of magazine cover the gorgeous Book Editor’s doomed romance with a man she didn’t know was married—and her bold idea for revenge. The (unofficial!) Sex Editor’s trip to soak in the world’s first champagne glass hot tub, which takes a very wrong turn. The Entertainment Editor’s clash with Joan Crawford and 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, uncovering the devastations and people who forged her into a controversial legend. It examines how one unsinkable group of women navigated gender roles and workplace power dynamics long before these issues entered the headlines. With dazzling, high-energy prose, it captures not just a movement, but a 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.

384 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication July 7, 2026

About the author

John Searles is the best-selling author of the novels Her Last Affair, Help for the Haunted, Strange but True and Boy Still Missing.

Hailed as “riveting” by The New York Times and “hypnotic” by Entertainment Weekly, Boy Still Missing, inspired Time magazine to name him a “Person to Watch,” and the New York Daily News to name him a “New Yorker to Watch.” His second novel, Strange but True was praised as “sinister and complex” by Janet Maslin of The New York Times, “extraordinary” by Publishers Weekly, and was named best novel of the year by Salon. John’s most recent novel, Help for the Haunted, was named a Boston Globe Best Crime Novel of the Year, an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Must List, and won the American Library Association’s Alex Award.

In 2019, Strange But True was adapted for film by the producers of La La Land and released in theaters nationwide by Lionsgate. Now streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime, the film stars the award-winning ensemble cast of Amy Ryan, Greg Kinnear, Brian Cox, Blythe Danner, Nick Robinson and Margaret Qualley. The movie was praised as “suspenseful and haunting” by The Hollywood Reporter and “a twisty tale of tragic secrets” by the Los Angeles Times.

John has appeared regularly on morning programs like NBC’s Today Show, CBS This Morning, Live! With Regis & Kelly, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and CNN to discuss his books.

The longtime books editor of Cosmopolitan, John also served as the magazine’s brand director, executive editor, and editor-at-large. His personal and travel essays, book and restaurant reviews have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post and numerous other magazines, newspapers and websites. He has a master's degree in creative writing from New York University and lives in New York.

Reviews

[Marisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun romp through the pages of a book about the life of an icon . I always wanted to write for a magazine and Searles brings this experience to life. I really enjoyed this novel!

[Gabby Nuñez · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 but I’ll round up⭐️ thank you to net galley & the publisher for this early arc! it was for sure a long read and the timeline got a little confusing as it jumped around through time but it was an enjoyable read! I had seen the old Hollywood film Sex & The Single Girl before but who knew the force of a woman behind it was also in charge of Cosmo magazine? iconic really!

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are books that arrive with their own lighting – a calibrated glow that flatters, forgives, sells. And then there are books that understand lighting as a kind of moral problem: who gets seen, who gets staged, who gets cut out of the frame, who learns to live anyway. “Single Girls,” John Searles’s buoyant, bruised, deliberately glossy novel about Helen Gurley Brown’s ascendance at “Cosmopolitan” in the late 1960s, belongs to the second category. It knows how to shimmer. It also knows how to haunt.

Searles is a novelist with an unusually magazine-ready set of gifts: he writes with velocity, with a talent for the scene that ends on the perfect turn, with a fondness for the telling list and the propulsive detail. In “Single Girls,” those gifts aren’t pasted on as period lacquer. They are the engine of the book’s argument. The sentences move like a staff meeting moves when the editor-in-chief has a headache and a deadline and a vision – when the talk is bright, fast, defensive, flirtatious, and sharper than it sounds. The prose is social. It listens. It interrupts. It gives everyone a line. And underneath that bustling surface, it is doing something more ambitious than a workplace romp: it is asking what it costs to build a self out of appetite and willpower, and what it costs to keep the machinery running once you’ve built it.

The novel’s Helen is introduced in the full theater of her mythology: a woman who can walk into a Hearst office dressed like a dare and make men who own rooms feel, if not fear, then at least a kind of uncertainty – the sense that the old rules are still the rules, but someone is rewriting them in the margins. Helen’s voice, full of pet names and practiced jokes (“pussycat,” “mouseburger”), can read at first like pure performance: an act that keeps the room light enough that no one notices the knife.

But Searles understands performance as a survival technology. Helen is funny because she has to be. She is relentless because she is scared. She is seductive because seduction is one of the few currencies women are allowed to mint for themselves, and she intends to spend hers on power, not on gratitude. If she seems sometimes to hover between saint and scold, Searles has the good sense to let that tension stand. A woman can be both: radiant to the women she lifts and ruthless to the women she thinks she cannot afford to be slowed by. The book’s moral intelligence lives in this refusal to make Helen easy.

“Single Girls” is set at that strange hinge between decades when the future was already arriving, but the past still owned the building. New York is cold, crowded, loud with taxis and gossip and ambition. Inside “Cosmo,” Searles gives us an editorial staff that feels, in its texture and friction, like an actual workplace rather than a stitched-together sisterhood. There is Liz, a gossip columnist-in-the-making with a reporter’s appetite and a streetwise sentimentality she pretends not to have. There is Myrna, whose frankness about sex can be either liberation or armor depending on the room. There is Eugenia, the fashion editor with a vision for what a cover can risk. There is Angela, who carries a private history so heavy it changes the way she holds her body at her desk. There is Belinda Sue, the books editor, who is both the most literary person in the room and the most quietly ferocious.

Searles gives these women distinct rhythms, distinct hungers. He also gives them a shared predicament: they are producing a magazine that will be mocked by people who never had to make such compromises to survive. They are making “Cosmopolitan,” yes – but they are also making themselves legible inside a system that profits from their legibility. The novel is alert to the way “empowerment” can be marketed, monetized, emptied out, and sold back to the people it claimed to serve. That alertness is what keeps the book from dissolving into nostalgia.

The magazine’s cover lines are one of the novel’s great inventions, even when they are drawn from history: they function like a chorus, a comedic drumbeat, and a document of desire. “How to Give Your Cat a Pill.” “The Bugaboo of Male Impotence.” “A Career Girl Tells About Her Abortion.” “The Lesbian Experience.” “Menstruation – Finally, What’s Really True and What Isn’t.” The sheer range is the point. The magazine is both ridiculous and radical; it is doing feminism with a straight face and a wink, often in the same paragraph. In Searles’s telling, the cover line becomes a kind of cultural fossil: it preserves a moment’s anxieties, fantasies, and blind spots in a single bright phrase. Reading them now, you can feel the familiar contemporary flinch – the way our own era’s language will one day look equally confident and equally strange.

This is one of the book’s quiet current-event resonances: the sense that the battles around women’s bodies and women’s work do not progress in a clean line. They loop. They relapse. They rebrand. “Single Girls” takes place in a world where a woman’s ability to control her reproduction is treated as scandalous content for the magazine rather than basic civic reality. The novel never needs to make a speech about our present to make you think about it. It simply shows you how precarious “progress” feels when it lives inside the everyday: in office policy, in a paycheck, in who gets invited to the party, in who must keep smiling anyway.

Searles’s best scenes are the ones in which the personal and the political collide in something as small as an invitation printed on nice paper. Late in the book, after “Cosmo” has become a “beautiful beast of a sales report,” Helen discovers that the Hearst men are holding a celebration – “strictly stag.” No women allowed. Not Helen, not the women who did the work, not the staff who made the magazine’s success a fact rather than a fantasy. It is a scene written with comic bite – Helen sweeping into “Popular Mechanics,” praising basement waterproofing with a sweetness that is, obviously, venom – but it is also written with a deeper understanding of the way exclusion operates. It is not only cruel; it is strategic. It reminds the women who runs the room that she is still, officially, not supposed to be there.

And because Searles is a novelist, not a pamphleteer, he makes that exclusion land not as a thesis but as a bruise. Helen does not become a symbol; she becomes a person whose old vow not to bring emotions into work is revealed as both impossible and, in its own way, tragic. When she looks at the wall of fifty-six covers she has overseen, she is not only admiring her output. She is trying to locate herself in the work. She is trying to convince herself that what she has made will outlast the contempt that surrounds it.

The book’s emotional architecture eventually leads us to the place Helen spends her life trying not to return to: the elevator in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1932, where her father dies in a catastrophic accident. Searles treats the trauma with restraint and, crucially, with an understanding of how trauma repeats. He makes the elevator not only a literal site of horror but a symbolic one: a box of controlled ascent and descent, a mechanism built on trust, a place where your body is forced to surrender agency. The elevator becomes the novel’s central metaphor for ambition itself – the promise of going up, the terror of losing control, the endless recalibration of fear.

In the present-day elevator scene at Hearst, the lights go out after a New Year’s Eve celebration. The staff is trapped between floors. Helen’s voice begins to fracture. The book’s tone, which has been moving with cocktail-bubble speed, suddenly slows into something more intimate and strange: memory, guilt, the mind’s insistence on replay. The novel allows itself, here, a near-magical turn: a revised memory, a conversation with the dead, an imagined permission. This is the book’s biggest risk, stylistically and emotionally. It could have read as a sentimental bow. Instead, because Searles has threaded the candy motif through the novel with such discipline – Helen’s refusal to eat candy for decades, her belief that appetite is culpability, her conversion of guilt into work – the scene feels earned. The “liberation” Helen experiences is not grand. It is specific: a piece of candy in her mouth. The body doing what it has been afraid to do. The mind letting go of the story it has used to punish itself.

This is, perhaps, the novel’s most bracing psychological insight: the way guilt can become an identity, a job, a religion. Helen has built an entire life out of proving she deserved to survive. She has turned survival into productivity. She has made herself indispensable as a way of avoiding grief. When she finally allows herself a sweetness she has denied, it registers as more than a plot point. It registers as a reorganization of the self. She stops treating pleasure as evidence against her.

Even in that climactic moment, Searles does not let the novel become solemn. He understands that, for Helen and for many of the women around her, humor is not decoration; it is the only language that can carry the weight. The book is filled with lines that are funny in the way real people are funny when they are trying not to fall apart. There are jokes about hairpieces, diets, terrible promotional gifts, “glitzy” parties and “drippy-dips” in Personnel. There are conversations that sound like girlfriends and colleagues and competitors all at once – women who love each other, and who also want something from each other, and who also know the world will be quicker to forgive their male peers.

If there is a weakness in “Single Girls,” it is related to that same strength. The novel’s delight in voice and banter can sometimes tip a character toward archetype – the wisecracking one, the flamboyant one, the anxious one. The best scenes correct for this by revealing the ache behind the persona, especially for Angela and for Helen. But there are moments where the women speak with a unison that feels slightly too polished, slightly too on-message. It is one thing for a magazine staff to share a worldview; it is another for them to sound, occasionally, like an ensemble designed to deliver the decade’s key arguments in the form of witty dialogue. The book is at its most powerful when it trusts conflict more than consensus.

Still, those are the kinds of flaws a lively book earns. “Single Girls” is not timid. It believes, like its heroine, in going too far rather than not far enough. It is a novel that understands the pleasures of a “Cosmo” voice – the glitter, the tease, the confidence – and it uses those pleasures to smuggle in grief, history, and a complicated argument about what liberation looked like in a world that insisted women remain grateful for their cages.

In its cultural register, the book belongs to that lineage of stories about women making a life inside a system built for men, where the work is both a ladder and a trap. If you think of the sly corporate comedy of “The Devil Wears Prada,” the smoky gender politics of “Mad Men,” or even the bright-bitter performance of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” you can feel the neighborhood “Single Girls” lives in. But Searles’s book has a different aim than satire and a different tenderness than nostalgia. It is less interested in punishing the era for its hypocrisies than in asking what those hypocrisies did to the people who had to navigate them daily.

And in its most overtly literary move, “Single Girls” finally turns toward the ephemerality of the medium it celebrates. Magazines, the characters observe, are rarely reread the way books are reread. They are dated quickly. They are thrown out. They are forgotten. Which raises the darker question: if the artifacts vanish, do the people vanish too? The novel itself becomes an answer – an attempt to rescue the women behind the masthead from the cultural shredder, to give them back interiority, to make their names mean something again. It is a generous project, even when it is cheeky. It is, in the deepest sense, an act of attention.

Searles also understands that attention is the one resource that cannot be faked. The book’s final pages widen outward – into the noise of the city, the chorus of “single girls,” the insistence that to hear what women have been saying for decades, you have to stop turning away. This is not a tidy moral. It is a dare, delivered with a smile.

A reader looking for a simple verdict on Helen Gurley Brown will not find it here – and that is the point. “Single Girls” is, among other things, a novel about how women are asked to be legible and lovable at the same time, and how impossible that bargain is. Helen is both admirable and exasperating. She is a feminist and a brand and a person. She is a woman who wants women to have more – more money, more sex, more pleasure, more choices – and who also reproduces the era’s hierarchies even as she tries to outsmart them. The novel does not absolve her. It also does not condemn her. It treats her as what she was: a complicated creature of appetite and fear.

That complexity is why the book works. It is why the period detail does not feel like costume. It is why the humor does not feel like frosting. And it is why the elevator, in the end, is not just a metaphor for career – up, down, stuck, released – but a metaphor for memory itself, the way it traps you until you learn a new story to tell.

“Single Girls” is a stylish, emotionally serious novel about the labor of becoming – about the ways women invent themselves in rooms that were not built for them, and about the private price of that invention. If the book occasionally shines its spotlight a little too brightly on its own themes, it is still hard not to admire its nerve, its tenderness, its insistence on pleasure as a form of truth.

My rating: 82/100.

[she_loves_books · Rating 4 out of 5]

*I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, Net Galley!

The timeline was confusing. A printed timeline of events or a section of who’s-who in the opening pages would help immensely. Some chapters focused on different characters but left me wanting more of their story with little wrap-around to follow, and years elapsed between segments. By the time you are back to how David, her husband, convinces her to write professionally and look for a publisher, I’d forgotten about the struggles she encountered actually doing so in the first few chapters. So much of her story is propelled by her “single girl years,” but we don’t learn many details of these years till after the magazine is established. I personally would have benefited from reading the story in chronological order, but the structure does not take away from the quality of the plot. I wish I had read the About the Author first. Searles has worked at Cosmo for over two decades and personally knew Helen Gurley.

The parts I loved were the crazy plotlines, one involving a jumbo champagne glass hot tub and another a workplace relationship gone wrong. As an avid historical fiction reader, I also liked the parts focusing on Helen becoming a publisher in the 1960s and circulating a women’s magazine in a man’s world. The Cosmo office is a setting I would like to work in, filled with intriguing, likeable characters. The exploration of the creative process interested me, especially knowing a true employee wrote this! Overall, I recommend this title for readers who like women’s fiction, historical fiction, or are interested in the world of magazines.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Searles has done it again! Single Girls was amazing! After the success of her book Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown is getting so much fan mail it literally is taking over her apartment (and her life!). She goes to one magazine after another pitching her idea for a new magazine especially for women. Not every woman just wanted to get married and have children. They had dreams and ambitions that they were often made to feel weren't normal. In this novel Helen Gurley Brown assembles a team of all women to write articles showcasing what women really wanted and desired from their lives.. It also explores her childhood and important events in her past that led her to be the true trailblazer that she was! As a fan of Cosmopolitan magazine it was so interesting to hear how this magazine got it's start. Highly recommend!

[Ellen Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a fun and unique novel and as a woman, I lavished in its pages. It’s a fictionalization of Helen Gurley Brown’s younger years as she helps Cosmo magazine take off. A writer, an icon, a girl’s girl…. There is so much empowerment from her in this book. Despite criticism, she pushes forward and just focuses on her supporters. There is so much girl power in this book and the themes and takeaways are timeless and relevant especially in today’s world. This book reminds us why women are amazing and really do rule the world. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.