Better Than Sane

April 19, 2004
Born into a wealthy Palo Alto family, Rose, a depressed and isolated child, didn't take a real job until age 40, when she became a receptionist at the New Yorker
in the 1980s. There, she became either intimate friends or lovers with many of the male staff writers, some of whom she names (Harold Brodkey, George Trow) and others to whom she gives pseudonymous monikers (Europe, Personality Plus). In this tantalizingly elliptical memoir, Rose, now 60, recounts her lifelong inability to connect with "the humans" (she's quite fine with animals), beginning with her own family: a volatile psychiatrist father; a beautiful, autocratic mother; and an older sister whom she admired but could never quite be like. Fleeing California for New York at 19 and living chaotically (spending more than a few nights sleeping in Central Park with a despondent lover), Rose befriended an older gay man and her life-long pal Francine, a Southern beauty. She returned to California to act, living with Burt Lancaster's son, Billy, and attending Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. The breakup with Billy sent her back to New York, a long depression, the New Yorker
and her life's most significant relationships. Rose acknowledges that she has been strongly defined by others, particularly powerful men. She writes much of the memoir in the same style as the "Talk of the Town" pieces she penned under Trow's tutelage; her prose is languid yet involving, and occasionally precious. Rose writes of her life rather than examining it, and her haunting memoir is exquisitely detailed, eerily fraught and ineffably sad. Agent, Andrew Wiley.