Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl

By Alison Rose and Porochista Khakpour

“This is the most glamorous book you’ll read this year. Or any year.”—Washington Post

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.

This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed author, Porochista Khakpour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nonpareil Books
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781567927764

Alison Rose

Alison Rose was born in Palo Alto, California. Her stories and “Talk of the Town” pieces began appearing in The New Yorker in 1987; she has also been a regular contributor to Vogue.

Book preview

Introduction

The story goes that every New York City girl self-mythologizes. It’s almost part of our pact. You’ve worked so hard to get there, and then you arrive and you’re very much stuck⁠—you hate it and yet you feel like you’re in an impossibly glamourous movie of you⁠—you can’t afford rent or food but somehow you still do⁠—you’re not quite any first, but never quite the very last⁠—and that’s your life, the tension between fact and fiction always aswirl. Sometimes it’s so literal, the way certain New York City girls sees themselves in that particularly glossy black-and-white of celluloid, maybe the way we’d think some precious prairie girl could see her existence dipped in a foggy sepia. But as a friend of mine once said, Nobody does New York like California, and so maybe the Californian New York girls self-mythologize the hardest. I know I did, I know I sometimes still do. At those lowest moments in trying to make it all work, I thought there has to be something more than just the three thousand miles to show for my own endless ill-advised efforts.

Enter my favorite literary enigma, ultimate CA-NYC-girl Alison Rose. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into when I first read Rose’s only book, Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, as so much of it felt familiar and yet revolutionary. I suddenly found myself cast as one of her own characters encountering her in her own book: overeager, naïve, intrusive, exhausting, but maybe (hopefully?) endearing in wanting very badly to sit next to her at a café neither of us could afford. I not only loved her, I hoped she loved me. By the time I recommended Rose’s book to a friend in the early 2010s, it was Renata Adler season, starting with the Speedboat revival⁠—Rose and Adler were not just coworkers and friends, but Adler also supplied this book’s epigraph (You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life)⁠—and my friend wondered if Rose’s writing was in the same vein. Absolutely not, I said. Flash forward another handful of years to my cautiously recommending Better Than Sane to a handful of blocked memoir students hung up on the politics of right and wrong when telling the truth. Most of them felt like I did while twisting and turning through Rose’s taboo-acrobatics: Rose’s madcap-socialite-survivalism gave us hope somehow. I would feel bad recommending the book because it could retail for forty dollars, as it went out of print shortly after its 2004 release. For some, the book could never land but for the readers who got it, it was like nothing else.

Once in a while, when their journey was aborted, the book would find its way back to my desk. I’ve not only read it many times, I’ve owned it even more times.

In the last few years, every few months, it feels like, I would send tweets into a sort of ether, wondering if anyone knows or has heard of Better Than Sane. I had a deep desire to reach out to Rose somehow. On the way, I’d encounter others⁠—mainly journalists and editors and authors⁠—who had also read the book and who delighted in an opportunity to share its many inside jokes. No one seemed to know where to find her. The one time I encountered her⁠—or came close, rather⁠—was for these very pages. When Godine asked me what out-of-print books they might attempt to revive, one title came immediately to mind and it was Better Than Sane, of course. Like most everyone I recommend it to, the editors caught the bug when they read it. And so this little miracle happened: they contacted Rose through her agency and she agreed to this publication.

We are just shy of this book’s twenty-year anniversary, but even missing that mark by just a sliver⁠—a sublime near-miss with symmetry⁠—feels so deliciously Roseian.

The original cover of Better Than Sane features a youngish Rose photographed by Bruce Weber, and the image almost exists out of time, or rather belongs to many times. It’s a very specific New York chic: all black, black long sleeves and black long legs, revealing the sort of thin frame one acquires not from working out but from doing or going without. Rose’s pale face blends with the white of the book’s background and the orange and pink of the graphics have the pop-y, somewhat subversive feel of a Warhol Factory production. But nothing on its cover is preparing you for what is inside.

And here we have the great irony of Better Than Sane, which sets it apart from so much of the canon of her literary it-girl contemporaries: this is the coming-of-age of a middle-aged girl. Rose’s first real job comes at forty, at the front desk on the writer’s floor of The New Yorker. It was dubbed School and eventually she found herself in a clique that, of course, she could only call Insane Anonymous, with George W. S. Trow and with Harold Brodkey as her anchors. One of Rose’s most interesting elegances is that we never fully realize the true nature of her relationships with both men. Brodkey, for example, had two names for Alison: Already utterly ruined and My bride. Trow, meanwhile, was as much mentor as he was accomplice, full of his own off-kilter adages and unsolicited advice gems, like you have to have a machine gun in your heart. There is no You can’t sit with us when it comes to Rose and Trow but there is You wouldn’t get it. And you wouldn’t.

The evolution from receptionist to staff writer at The New Yorker is only part of this story, but it’s a compelling one for any writer to consider. We are perhaps too comfortable with the classic Didion confession about her own chronic underestimation in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. Rose, who dabbled in acting and modeling, was never invisible. She might have instead offered her own strategy of demanding attention and disrupting norms. A bit of acting out is a great education for any writer. And, once on the page, there is that harder lesson that the best writers ultimately must confront: once you develop your own voice, you can expect a segment of your projected audience to never hear it. We could argue that without Rose and Trow there would be no Talk of the Town sound today. It’s easy to want more for her in this narrative. But how Rose was noticed⁠—the negative attention that comes with being a woman that is even more unapologetic in being eccentric than beautiful⁠—probably did her in the most.

But then again, who is saying she was done in? Who is to say she wanted more?

Rose, after all, committed to little else in letters after this book. Maybe she was fine, better than fine.

Self-pity, like relatability, is a language Rose does not speak. She isn’t interested in your ability to feel for her much less comprehend her, nor is she particularly caught up in being consistent. She is the person who says I never did think of myself as a person who would get married and live in a house and The truth is, it can be a form of actual social day-to-day social torture to pretend not to notice the little dishes of poison married people offer you all the time, but then, just a paragraph later, a man whom she calls Mr. Normalcy is valorized as a whole family in one person.

There is a unique joy in how unrelatable this book is, but I also found myself very surprised by how much of this book I could relate to. I am a CA-NYC-girl who has done some time in journalism and eventually cranked out a memoir, with a perhaps similarly dizzying array of New York lovers and friends. I was once in a self-imposed estrangement from my own family. I have been lost far more often than I have been found, and it rarely bothered me. I rolled with all kinds of adversity with the absolute minimum of reflection far too often. Who can say if I was eating-disordered or just too destitute to afford food in my twenties, for example? I wasn’t about to worry about it. I was allergic to advice or anything prescriptive. I survived and often still survive in a way I can’t account for. And I probably will the leave the question blank if you try.

In this way, Rose can be an angel for us devils, a patron saint for people who don’t do patron saints. Maybe for those outside of us kindred spirits, something rubs off too. I happen to think with this book if you read all the way through its gorgeously indulgent, dazzlingly distracted, scrumptiously narrative-resistant spirals, you realize if you are not her, you are maybe becoming her, or so you should hope. It’s one way out! And she makes you her family in a sense. Gossip and insider buzzwords are thrown around like confetti here, thrilling and slapdash, never mind this party features Anaïs Nin, Robert Oppenheimer, Otto Rank, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Tennessee Williams, Mike Nichols, Shelly Winters, Anthony Hopkins, and many more. And of course it always comes back to Rose⁠—without even willing it, she manages to come across more compelling than anyone, but isn’t this how every memoir should go if truly honest?

It’s been many years since I’ve gone back, over and over, searching for Alison Rose, Googling for crumbs I may have missed after I first fell in love with Better Than Sane. Here’s eBay and Amazon stray copies that cost too much, a handful of reviews, a books single women should read now or whenever blog post, an interview where Refinery29 girlboss Christene Barberich highlights it as an educational read for her, and hilariously many links that lead to me⁠—whether it is me mentioning her on Twitter, in a full essay in Bookforum, on my old Substack. I’ve been talking about this book nonstop since I first read it and it’s now my hope that I won’t be so alone with its secrets.

You should join me, over here. I’m at the cubicle, scanning the backs of heads for my Insane Anonymous; I’m whispering too loudly at the water cooler with the few of you with a similar aversion to nine-to-fives, a propensity for soft snark, and a taste for everyday scandal; I’m dishing on someone who wronged us at martini hour at the Plaza while we’re washing down benzo residue with our manyeth diet sodas, our collective scent somebody’s pipe smoke spiking designer-imposter perfumes

¹

; and when we walk away, we take our time, because our prime has passed, because none of us are getting promoted, because the after-hours we linger in never count, because maybe we would have it any other way but you’ll never know.

Unless, of course, you know.

Porochista Khakpour

New York City, 2023

---

1

Fragrances in which Ms. Rose would not be caught dead, believe you me.

better than sane

Preface:

My Room Alone, with Animals

In my room, on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York City, there’s the same oval mirror that I looked in when I was growing up in California. It’s fake French. The ceiling is high, and two huge sets of windows on one side of the room are made up of small rectangles of pastel-colored glass. The walls are painted pink, and the ceiling is white⁠—the room looks like a cake.

A man I had a lot of⁠—or some⁠—sex with there, a doleful rock-and-roll icon with the prettiest mouth (his music is still upsettingly on the radio all the time), told me that the room looked like New Orleans. A big quilt given to me in 1970 by a man I knew in Los Angeles hangs above a refectory table with three lamps on it and also a blue typewriter. There’s a green wicker chair with chintz cushions; my cat used to sit on it. The head of my bed is pushed against the middle of one wall; on one side of the bed, there’s a round table with photographs of the cat, Toast, and of my dog, Puppy Jane, on it. I used to have a little collection of photographs of men⁠—a set of boyfriends I had once⁠—on that table, but I took them off and stashed them in a drawer, after some deliberation.

The table on the other side of my bed has a blue vase on it with dried peonies all shoved together; and my dark-red hymnal from the Annie Wright Seminary; and a navy-blue Book of Common Prayer that George Trow gave me when we were friends. There’s a footstool from my childhood room, and parquet floors that I like, and a big old rug the colors of the windows. There’s a framed pale-blue horse that Billy the Fish made at the kitchen table in West Hollywood thirty-two years ago, when we lived together. A while ago now, Monique, my French friend, made a bright-blue tissue-paper sky with tinfoil stars in it and stuck it under the frame above the horse because she thought the horse looked triste. On the floor, leaning against the wall, is a photograph of me from 1977. A few weeks ago, a man I have a thing about these days⁠—I forced him to come into my room for just a minute to look around⁠—saw it and said, You look noble. I do.

Inside one of my closets are seven shopping bags full of pieces of paper with sacred things written on them by men I’ve known, and then two boxes of drafts and photocopies of letters I wrote to them, neatly tied up with good-looking string. The other closet has mostly black clothes in it. There are tapes and CDs all over the floor by the bed and, in frames on different walls, four drawings by Harold Brodkey, perhaps the king of all my old boyfriends; a gold paper star that George, who was my absolute favorite, gave me one Christmas; and a drawing by another man of Puppy Jane attempting to fly too close to the sun. She looks like me in it. In one of Harold’s drawings, there’s a very small bird flying toward a birdhouse in a tree. The title he gave it is ‘‘Wow! A Happy Ending!" Another drawing of his, of me, or my face, has a typewritten comment from him on it:

There should be a Bureau of Metropolitan Longing to explain to you why your life doesn’t mean more than it does and why you don’t have a lover who is your equal in devotion and the ability to do his work.

People can come into my room if I invite them, but if they don’t like it they can get out fast, because it’s my room. Everything that’s in it is my private collection of my whole life: the good stuff. What I think and have thought and the aura of other people who’ve been in there and the rooms I’ve had before this one⁠—everything in my room that shows, and a lot that doesn’t, is self-sufficiently important. It eradicates the bad stuff that has threatened to define me all my life, when I look around at it. Most of the framed things on the walls have to do with people I’ve known who still matter to me. Perhaps not coincidentally, they all either made drawings or wrote things down that I’ve framed. These are my proof that I was, as George Trow said to me one time, rescued by my own actions and didn’t get killed.

The Original Married Man

I’ll never be anywhere I like better than the veranda off my childhood bedroom in Palo Alto, California. My room was upstairs, fairly large, with a few French windows overlooking the garden. The bedspreads on my twin beds were quilted in cream-colored chintz with little claret-red rosebuds all over, the same as the curtains on the windows. From the ceiling hung a small chandelier with grapes on it, a friendly presence at night. But the thing that mattered most was the veranda. All the wisteria and magenta bougainvillea grew up onto the veranda, and when I lay there under the green awning on my collapsible chaise with green cushions, anything bad or ugly was automatically blacked out: gone.

The house in Palo Alto was made out of sandy-colored stucco, with cream-colored wood trim. Mother’s mother and stepfather had built it in 1928. It had a pitched roof with a dark-green front door and a wrought-iron grille over a small window, and all the shutters were painted British racing green. I don’t think of the house without seeing fairly bright, undepressing small green leaves all over it, but it didn’t look as cheerful in winter, when the leaves fell off. Facing the street was an enormous blue spruce and two deodar cedars, the kind whose tops tip over. There was another hovering blue spruce (looking old, like the other, because the needles were silver), and a little boxwood hedge going all the way around the house. From the front door to the sidewalk was a winding brick path with violas (blue, lavender, white) on either side and, along the front sidewalk in the spring, purple iris, which looked too thin and unprotected against the street. They died fast.

Out in the back of the house, in a corner, stood a huge evergreen tree that could have been in Yosemite. A white owl used to sit in it. Across from a brick terrace, sort of in a row, stood some fruit trees: nectarine, apricot, peach, a flowering Japanese plum. Down in the garden were lilacs, daphnes, dahlias, and sweet peas, and cannas: big white flowers with orange centers. A stone wall went around the back of the garden and along one side of it. The grass out back was scalloped with tuberous begonias (the small ones) in a border. Outside the breakfast room were an orange tree and a grapefruit tree, but the fruit didn’t grow very well: undersized, not so sweet, too pale. Not enough sun.

I never did think of myself as a person who would get married and live in a house. My mother and father seemed like two separate entities in our house, so to me marriage was a state and a house was a place where people who are wittily mean to each other live in an isolated way.

At the dinner table, my sister⁠—she’s six years older⁠—and I would sit at our places in our school uniforms, navy pleated skirts and white middy blouses. A little crystal bell sat on the table by my mother’s place, to call Nita, the maid. (Don’t forget the finger bowls and the butter balls, my sister told me on the telephone the other day.)

My father sat at the head of the table, in a chair with arms. The rest of us sat in chairs with no arms, but all of them, like his, were upholstered in dark yellow-gold damask. Oddly, there was a portrait of me in a white dress on the dining-room wall behind him. Daddy nearly always looked as if he were on the verge of losing control in one violent way or another, as if he were going to laugh at us or swat us away in a fit of bad temper. He had green eyes, a good color, but they often took on a sneering and impatient cast. His hair was very dark and straight, with some hair tonic in it. He usually wore a dark suit and a white shirt. In between courses, my father would rant about his patients (he was a psychiatrist) or his hatred of Communism, and my sister would be mute when he asked her questions about current world crises. Any answer she came up with to any question he asked was invariably wrong. My sister might start to cry, Mother saying, "Milton! You don’t hear yourself," as he hollered some more. Other times my sister or I, or even my mother, would get up and run.

Because I never said a word at the table, he would sometimes turn his attention to me and say in a very loud voice, How are you, Personality Minus?⁠—he had a way with language⁠—or he yelled and threatened to send me to Agnew State mental hospital, near San Jose, where he frequently went on his after-dinner rounds. At other times, as if there were only the two options, he might say to me, You’re going to be a femme fatale, Babs. My mother and my sister and I were Babs I, Babs II, and Babs III to him, though none of our names resembled the name

Reviews for Better Than Sane

[mrsbeesly · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rose had it correct when she wrote " You can't be the smartest person who doesn't do anything forever." I can relate to Alison because I love to stay in my apartment with my cat and read.