When 19-year-old Janet Groth landed a job as the receptionist at the New Yorker in 1957, she believed it was only a matter of time before she rose through the ranks to fact-checker, reporter and regular contributor. More than anything, she wanted to be a writer; she once even submitted a story to a contest in Mademoiselle, though she didn't win. ("Another blond with daddy problems won that year," she recalls. "Name of Sylvia Plath.")
Twenty-one years after starting the job, though, Groth was still taking messages for the people she once thought would be her professional equals. When she left the receptionist's desk in 1978, she took with her the friendship and respect of her co-workers, a long-earned Ph.D. in English and an arsenal of literary gossip--but no byline.
The Receptionist recounts Groth's two-decade stint at the magazine and how she eventually learned to throw off the "New Yorker mantle of borrowed fame" to find her own self-worth. While readers looking for dirt on the likes of John Berryman and Muriel Spark won't be disappointed, Groth devotes much of her memoir to life outside the magazine's office, including a rather exhaustive analysis of her many romantic exploits.
Intimate and breezily conversational, The Receptionist is less a juicy tell-all about a legendary magazine and more a woman's story of her own becoming amid the chaos and glitz of Manhattan in the 1960s. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice