Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl

by Alison C. Rose

Book Overview

"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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1567927750
• ISBN13: 9781567927757
• Release Date: August 2023
• Publisher: Nonpareil Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

Original, Beautiful, Droll, Elegiac and Perfect

I read Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl all the way through, in one sitting. I couldn't put it down. The book is original, beautiful, droll (as Rose would say), elegiac and perfect. It is also sexy. Better Than Sane is a piece of literature, something people aren't accustomed to anymore. Anyone who doesn't agree with me doesn't know what literature is. Rose has created an entire set of characters here. Their interactions made me a little bored with my own life. Through the dialogue (there isn't dialogue like this in any book I can think of)and the prose itself, the reader understands how Alison Rose has survived. She was "rescued by her own actions and didn't get killed," as George Trow, her mentor at The New Yorker and writer of "Within the Context of No Context" said to her. An editor at the magazine, where Rose became a staff writer, said to her, "You see beyond." She does.

A REAL WRITER

Alison Rose is a real writer. Better Than Sane:Tales from a Dangling Girl is literature, which is hard to come by these days. Rose knows what friendship is. I have memorized a sentence she wrote about the writer Harold Brodkey: "If I have, say, twenty fragments of my mind all to myself, and I give ten to Harold, then half of them are taken care of for a few hours. Then I have only half the trouble, half the isolation. A real luxury." In the chapter "Dangling Girl," Rose's loyal friend Francine flies in from Atlanta to help Alison pack up her office at The New Yorker. The description is sad and charming and so beautiful that I could feel the decades of friendship, as if I had been in the office with them. On the last moving day, the brilliant writer, Renata Adler,(there is a sublime Adler quote in the epigraph)takes the photographs of George Trow and Harold Brodkey off the wall, a final goodbye. Parts of Better Than Sane are elegiac, but all of it is written in prose that, elegiac or not, brings happiness to a serious reader. We need Better Than Sane in our uncertain world.

A BOOK THAT I LOVE

As a longtime admirer of Alison Rose's pieces in The New Yorker, her Talk of the Town stories and profiles, over many years, I am so happy she has written Better than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, a book that I love. I read it in one sitting. There is a nobility about Rose's story, a life spent in search of a direction for her singular and considerable gifts. When Rose writes about the characters whom she loves and who love her back, she writes with such style and wit and self-awareness that many of her sentences will stay with me for a long, long time. Agreat chapter is a road trip that Alison and her mentor and friend, George, take through the South. It made me cry. Another favorite is a romantic and sexy description of an affectionate lover: "It seemed to me he brought the highest reverence -- a sort of tactile worship -- to being up close to another person." If any reader has doubted herself, she will find comfort and reassurance in Alison Rose's spectacularly well-written first book.

A BRAND NEW VOICE IN THE WORLD

Alison Rose's Better than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girlchanged my life in the same way J.D.Salinger's Catcher in the Rye did when I was a teen-ager. Without Holden Caulfield, I don't know how I would have survived mean friends in highschool, my brothers, my parents, and all the rest. Now, in my thirties, I feel the same way about Alison Rose. Her writing is a brand new voice in the world; truthful, singular, witty. The way she writes about her friendships throughout the book (in both California and New York), and particularly with the writers at The New Yorker,"a tribe of Gods," who helped her to become herself and to become a writer, has given me strength. Alison Rose has taught me not to give up. Better Than Sane is a great story.

a great writer

alison rose has been one of the best things going in new york for some time. she has had great and talented friends, such as harold brodkey and george trow, and she learned something from everyone she met, but she has come up with a voice and a story and a way that is completely her own and completely riveting and new. in my opinion, this book will go from friend to friend until it becomes a classic.