When a Person Becomes Your Plot Twist

I read City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert last year, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
It’s one of those books that stays lodged somewhere in your mind, not because of any dramatic plot twist, but because it quietly explains something about life that you only understand much later, when you’re living it yourself.

The story follows Vivian Morris: nineteen, freshly expelled from Vassar, sent to New York to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a somewhat chaotic theatre called the Lily Playhouse. It’s 1940, and the world is tilting toward war. Vivian, who’s good with a sewing machine but not so good with life direction, tumbles into a dazzling world of showgirls, sequins, and stage lights.

Then comes Marjorie Lowtsky — clever, stylish, and sharp as a sewing needle. She works at her parents’ used-clothing shop and has the kind of mind that turns scraps into art. When the war changes everything and the theatre world collapses, Vivian’s life is blown apart by scandal and consequence. It’s Marjorie who appears with an idea: Let’s start a business together. They open a custom bridal boutique, and through it, Vivian’s life finally falls into place — not the life she imagined, but one that fits her.

It made me wonder: how different would Vivian’s life have been if she’d never met Marjorie?

And, if I’m being honest, how different would mine have been if I hadn’t met her — my version of Marjorie?

This year has been brutal. It stripped me bare.
My job ended, I had to let go of my beautiful, beautiful apartment, and I found myself back in my childhood home, where I once lay in my bedroom staring at the ceiling, dreaming of my dazzling future. Now, at thirty-three, staring at that same ceiling again feels less aspirational and more like existential comedy.

Everything that once defined my independence — my salary, my space, my sense of forward motion — vanished. I felt like I was in emotional foreclosure.

And then there was her. My partner, my friend. She appeared in the middle of the wreckage with quiet steadiness, the kind that doesn’t try to fix your life but simply holds the corner of it until you can start sewing it back together.

She started saying things like, “Why don’t you move here?”
“We could start something together.”
“You don’t have to do this all alone.”

At first, I brushed it off as kindness. Then, as possibility.
And now, as my next chapter.

Reading about Vivian and Marjorie felt eerily familiar. I saw myself in that post-war version of Vivian, standing amid the ruins of an old life, uncertain what to build next, and then being handed a lifeline in the form of another person’s faith.

Because that’s what it is, really: faith.
When someone says come with me, what they’re really saying is I see a future where you belong.

I kept turning the pages thinking about how the universe sometimes uses people like that. They don’t show up to rescue you. They show up to redirect you. They hand you a new map when yours has burned to ash.

That’s what my partner did. She pointed to a completely new horizon and said, “Let’s live there.”
It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But simple things can be seismic.

I know some people think it’s strange to draw life lessons from fiction. But I’ve always believed that fiction is how the universe whispers its secrets. It’s how we recognize ourselves in stories we never lived. Maybe that’s what writers like Elizabeth Gilbert do best — they write the truth in disguise.

What I love about City of Girls is that Vivian doesn’t get a fairytale ending. Her life isn’t tied with a bow. It’s messy, unconventional, and real. She grows older, wiser, more self-aware, and through it all, she remains grateful for the people who turned her fate sideways.

That resonates with me. Because I, too, am in the middle of a sideways fate.

Lately, I’ve been deciding what to take with me — the few things that still feel like mine — as I get ready to move to her country. We’re starting a small business together. Some days it feels thrilling; other days it feels like a terrible idea. But mostly, it feels alive.

I keep thinking about Vivian’s wedding dresses, how they were born from the scraps of her life. She took remnants and turned them into something beautiful for other people’s beginnings. Maybe that’s what I’m doing too. Taking the remains of one life and stitching together another.

When I read about Vivian and Marjorie’s partnership, it didn’t strike me as romantic; it struck me as cosmic. As if two souls had accidentally met at the same intersection of need and talent and said, “Okay, let’s build something out of this mess.”

That’s the kind of companionship that changes you. The kind that doesn’t ask you to be smaller or quieter or safer. The kind that hands you a key and says, “Here — there’s a door over there. Let’s see what’s behind it.”

If I’m honest, I don’t think I would’ve had the courage to start over alone. I like to believe I would have figured it out eventually — that resilience is coded into me somewhere — but it would’ve been slower, sadder, maybe even impossible.

Instead, I met someone who made the reset feel like a rebirth.
She’s the Marjorie to my Vivian. Not because we’re identical to them, but because, like them, we’re building something new from the rubble.

It’s funny, I read that book a year ago and thought it was just a lovely story about female friendship and reinvention. I didn’t know I’d soon be living its moral. I didn’t know I’d understand it not just intellectually, but viscerally — that sensation of someone arriving in your story just as you’ve hit the blank page.

Vivian didn’t find her calling alone; she found it through connection. And maybe that’s true for all of us. Maybe we’re not meant to discover our purpose in solitude, but to encounter it through others — in the quiet crossing of paths that changes everything.

So yes, I’m saying yes — to the new country, the new business, the new life.
Because I saw how beautifully things turned out for Vivian and Marjorie.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s the universe’s way of telling me: you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

Cynthia A. Murungi

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