Alison Rose, "a beguiling, if inept, receptionist at the New Yorker who found her way into the magazine's pages with her idiosyncratic essays and profiles--including one particular article about her time there and the men who were her mentors and lovers that landed like a grenade and became the basis of a memoir," died in late September, the New York Times reported. She was 81.
Rose was 41 when she took the receptionist's job on the writers' floor of the New Yorker, which was still in its longtime home on West 43rd St. Although her job was a coup, she was aided by Brendan Gill, a family friend.
Harold Brodkey, one of the many New Yorker writers "who scooped her up, told her, 'Build a life out of bad judgment.' He added, 'I have,' " the Times wrote, adding that "she wrote that down and taped it to her refrigerator. And as admirers collected in her glass cubicle, opining on this or that but mostly on Ms. Rose's many charms, she wrote down their aperçus, too."
Her "epigrammatic" mentors also included George W.S. Trow, the cultural critic best known for his essay "Within the Context of No-Context." He told her, "Darling, we're almost like other people." Brodkey wrote on one of her message pads: "What an admirably dark person you are." The two men argued about Rose's place in the world, with Brodkey contending she was "the princess of the 20th century," and Trow countering: "No, Alison is the duchess."
Rose called the New Yorker "school," studying hard, reading back issues, and writing notes to her boyfriends, a trio of married writers she nicknamed Europe, Mr. Normalcy and Personality Plus, who all wrote back to her. "This made her a less-than-attentive receptionist. She was an erratic message-taker, and her cubicle was often so full of her coterie that she failed to notice when a visitor needed to be buzzed through," the Times wrote, adding: "Inevitably, she was fired."
She began to write, and work as a literary assistant to Trow, a pairing that was encouraged by Charles McGrath, then an editor at the New Yorker and later the editor of the New York Times Book Review. Together, she and Trow produced Talk of the Town pieces. By the time he dropped her as his project and friend, she was writing on her own and back in the New Yorker's building, with her own office.
When Tina Brown became the magazine's editor, she encouraged Rose to write about her romantic life. "How I Became a Single Woman," which appeared in 1996, "caused a minor ruckus at School. Despite their nicknames, the married men were easily identifiable, and that meant upsets at home and the snubbing of Ms. Rose at the office. It also earned her a book deal, a sizable advance and a terrible case of writer's block," the Times noted.
"She felt she got paid for losing the pleasures of her life," said author and friend Honor Moore. "She was very neurotic, which both blocked and helped her; it made her writing singular, and also kept her from more achievement."
It took Rose eight years to finish Better than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, which was published in 2004 to good reviews but not wide acclaim. By then, she was one of the writers cut from the New Yorker when the magazine moved into Condé Nast headquarters in 1999.
"She was so clever," said editor Sarah Crichton, who worked on Rose's memoir for a time. "So gimlet-eyed. So in-her-own-musical-in-her-head. Most of the time, you couldn't figure out what the musical was, and sometimes she couldn't.... I was thinking how great it was she finished the book. She really wanted to have written a book." In 2023, Godine brought Better Than Sane back into print at the suggestion of author Porochista Khakpour.
"I think she's the last of the great New Yorker eccentrics," McGrath said. "She was an original."