Alison Rose, an attractive, if inept, receptionist at The New Yorker who landed in the magazine’s pages with her idiosyncratic essays and profiles — including a 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 at her home in Manhattan. She was 81 years old.
Author Honor Moore, a friend, said the cause and exact date of Ms Rose’s death were not known.
Ms. Rose was 41 when she came to The New Yorker. She was beautiful, brilliant and unhappy, having traveled her previous decades between New York and California trying to find her place in the world. She had worked, or tried to work, as an actress and model. She was almost photographed for Vogue, but had a habit of canceling bookings at the last minute, frozen by anxiety and the after-effects of binge eating.
She typed manuscripts for Gardner McKay, the heartthrob actor turned author and drama critic. Later, she worked as a temporary typist in, by her count, 128 different offices.
She had a disastrous long-term relationship with Bill Lancaster, a son of Burt Lancaster, the conclusion of which resulted in her sleeping on a roommate’s couch for the better part of a year. His psychiatrist prescribed him Valium; his father, a psychiatrist, prescribed him speed.
Ms. Rose’s closest literary sister was Eve Babitz, who did her own careening. But unlike Ms. Babitz, Ms. Rose was not much of a voluptuous person. Self-abnegation was his default state.
Landing the receptionist job at 18 – the New Yorker’s writers’ floor, then still in its longtime home on West 45th Street – was a coup, although she was helped by Brendan Gill, a family friend.
So was getting a studio on East 68th Street, where she lived for the rest of her life. She got herself a cat, which she named Toast, as a reward for giving up Valium.
“I could not afford another round of my famous bad judgment, which was, according to my own records at that time, eternal,” she wrote in her memoir, “Better Than Sane: Tales From a Dangling Girl.”
Harold Brodkey, one of several New York writers who recruited her, told her, “Build your life on bad judgment.” He added: “I to have.”
She wrote it down and stuck it on her refrigerator. And as admirers gathered in her glass booth, commenting on this or that but especially on Ms. Rose’s many charms, she also noted their glimpses.
The most epigrammatic of his admirers and his most loyal mentors were Mr. Brodkey and George W. S. Trow, the acerbic cultural critic best known for his essay “In the Context of Non-Context,” which introduced a catchphrase for the ages.
“Honey, we’re almost like the rest,” Mr. Trow told her.
“What an admirably gloomy person you are,” Mr. Brodkey wrote in pencil on one of his notepads.
They argued about Mrs. Rose’s place in the world.
“Alison is the princess of the 20th century,” Mr. Brodkey said.
“No, Alison is the Duchess,” Mr. Trow retorted. (She also wrote these sentences.)
She called the New Yorker “School” and treated it as such. She studied hard, rereading issues and writing notes to her boyfriends, a trio of married writers she nicknamed Europe, Mr. Normalcy, and Personality Plus, all of whom wrote back to her.
This made her an inattentive receptionist. She received messages unpredictably, and her office was often so full of her coterie that she didn’t notice when a visitor was dropping by.
Inevitably, she was fired.
At home, in her apartment, she begins to write. At first, she played amanuensis to Mr. Trow, in a duet encouraged by Charles McGrath, then an editor at the New Yorker and later editor of the New York Times Book Review.
“Give in to it,” Mr. McGrath told him, referring to Mr. Trow’s spirit. “Let it wash over you.”
Together, she and Mr. Trow produced Talk of the Town articles, short — and, at the time, unsigned — stories that helped define the magazine.
He told her: “See some genuine joy in the midst of the horror of the world. » (She was about to ask a dog groomer.)
By the time he abandoned her as his project and his friend, she was writing solo and was back in the building, with her own office.
“She really dove in when she was profiling someone,” James L. Brooks, the film’s director and producer, said in an interview. She met Mr. Brooks while writing about actor and filmmaker Albert Brooks (no relation to James); the article she produced was a tour de force resulting from hours spent on the phone chatting with her subject.
Later, James Brooks gave her a small role as a psychiatric patient in his 1997 film, “As Good as It Gets.” “I know she gasped and I think she had a line,” he said.
It was Tina Brown, when she was editor of the New Yorker, who encouraged Ms. Rose to write about her love life. “How I Became Single,” an elliptical coming-of-age tale, was published in April 1996. (One of its most memorable lines: “The truth is, it can be a form of daily social torture to pretend not to notice the poisonous little dishes that married people offer you all the time.”)
The play caused a bit of a ruckus at school. Despite their nicknames, married men were easily identifiable, leading to upheavals at home and snobbery of Mrs. Rose at the office. It also landed him a book deal, a sizable advance, and a terrible case of writer’s block.
“She felt like she was being paid for losing the pleasures of her life,” Ms. Moore said in an interview. “She was very neurotic, which both blocked and helped her; it made her writing unique and also prevented her from achieving more.”
It took Ms. Rose eight years and the care of three editors to complete the book, which was published in 2004 to good reviews but not widespread acclaim. Many critics described her as a crazy spinster, despite the book’s dark underpinnings.
By then, she had lost her position; she was one of several underperforming writers removed from The New Yorker’s roster when the magazine moved to Condé Nast’s headquarters, then at 4 Times Square, in 1999.
“Every time a single article was published,” Ms. Rose wrote of her time at the New Yorker, “I was thrilled. If the weather was nice, I would sit on a park bench with coffee in a paper cup and think about it – seriously. I realized it. What I had done, on my own.”
Alison Charles Rose was born on June 21, 1944 in Palo Alto, California. His mother, Alice (Phillips) Rose, from a wealthy family, had a degree in social work and later worked for the Red Cross. His father, Milton Rose, was a prominent psychiatrist.
Alison’s childhood was dark and privileged. Her father presided over the dinner table with constant rage and she remained mother. “How are you, Personality Minus?” » he would challenge her.
At the age of 8, she was not sleeping and worried, she wrote, “about whether I was a living being or not.”
His mother said, “Well, maybe you could go to sleep for a while. They put animals to sleep.”
At 10 years old, she was consoled by the attentions of her older sister’s boyfriends. “I learned,” she wrote, “how to use charm, or whatever, as if it were a passport. I didn’t know where I thought I was going with it, but it never occurred to me to stop.”
She moved to New York at 19 and often slept in the park, in seedy hotels or in squats in Hell’s Kitchen with a handsome alcoholic from North Carolina whose parents sent her money from home – as Ms. Rose did. This lasted until he started talking to God and she had him committed.
“She was so smart,” Sarah Crichton, the veteran book editor who worked on Ms. Rose’s memoir for a time, said in an interview. “So gimlet-eyed. So into her own musical in her head. Most of the time you couldn’t figure out what the musical was, and sometimes she couldn’t.”
Ms Crichton added: “I was thinking how great it was that she finished the book. She really wanted to write a book.”
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
In 2023, independent publisher Godine, based in Boston, reissued “Better Than Sane” at the suggestion of Porochista Khakpour, a novelist and essayist who taught the book to her creative writing students at Bard, Wesleyan and other institutions. The new edition is now in its second printing.
“I think she’s the last of the great New York eccentrics,” Mr. McGrath said. “She was original.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed to the research.
