Rose takes us from her childhood to her years at The New Yorker, about growing up in California, daughter of a movie-star-handsome psychiatrist who was charming to friends but a bully and a tyrant to his family; moving to Manhattan in her twenties, sleeping in Central Park, subsisting on Valium, Eskatrol, and Sara Lee orange cake; moving to Los Angeles, attending the Actors Studio, living with Burt Lancaster's son, and about meeting Gardner McKay, her childhood TV idol, and becoming sacred, close, lifelong friends; and, finally, returning to New York, where she found the inspiration to pursue a career as a writer.
The most glamorous book you will read this year. If you read it next year, that will still be true. If you were one of the few who read it in 2004, read it again ... Rose also exudes a glamour of the kind some fairies in folklore possess ... Enchanting ... Rose describes her affairs and assignations with wistful wit, bending ordinary language into bands around her bare ring finger ... A perfect book.
The most radical anti-memoir I’ve read: no answers, no questions even, but instead a sort of anti-tribute to the art of finding one’s people, or thriving in the failure to do so.
Some readers will find Rose's preoccupation with male approval knotty ... But at times Rose swerves from doormat-like compliance to burgeoning feminism.
