When forty-year-old Alison Rose got a job as a receptionist at the New
Yorker in the mid-80s, she was taken up by the writers there--"a tribe
of gods," who turned her from a semi-recluse into a full-fledged writer
for the magazine. These kindred souls formed an impromptu club: Insane
Anonymous (a "whole other world that was better than sane"). Rose was
unlike anyone in the group. As Renata Adler said of Alison's path, "It
was the most nuanced, courageous, utterly crazy way to have wended."
In Better Than Sane, Rose takes us from her childhood to her years
at The New Yorker, revealing how, often, she "didn't care enough about
existence to keep it going" and preferred to stay in her room with her
animals and think. She writes 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 "Billy the Fish," encountering Helmut Dantine
of Casablanca fame, who gave her shelter from the storm, 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.
