Gray Youth: The Story of a Very Modern Courtship and a Very Modern Marriage

Amory Towers is an art student in 1914, and she wants more from life than the society around her is prepared to give. When she first arrives in Paris, wide-eyed and hungry for experience, she finds something that feels like freedom: her first kiss, her first taste of art as lived experience, her first intimation that the world might contain exactly what she's looking for. But Paris is expensive, and Amory returns to London, to the respectable boarding house run by the McGraths, where "Uncle George" and her friend Dorothy provide a buffer against the overwhelming city. The problem is Cosimo, who is maddening, changeable, and entirely too present. He cuts his hair in ways that disappoint her; he fixes her door; he establishes boundaries and then blurs them. This is a courtship for the modern age, whatever that means, and Amory is caught between what she should want and what she actually feels. Onions writes with sharp precision about the gap between the rhetoric of modern love and the complicated, often uncomfortable reality of two people trying to find their way.