Rose, Alison (C.) 1944(?)-

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ROSE, Alison (C.) 1944(?)-

PERSONAL: Born c. 1944, in Palo Alto, CA.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Random House, Inc., 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Model, actress, and author. New Yorker, New York, NY, receptionist 1987—.

WRITINGS:

Better than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to the column, "Talk of the Town," in the New Yorker. Also frequent contributor to Vogue.

SIDELIGHTS: Occasional model and sometime actress Alison Rose finally found a niche for herself when she took a job as a receptionist at the New Yorker in 1987. Attractive, witty, and engaging, Rose managed to draw the attention of the magazine's glitterati, including Harold Brodkey and George W. S. Trow, and began collaborating on its popular "Talk of the Town" feature. Rose's years at the New Yorker are the heart of her memoir, Better than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl.

In a book that is "deadpan, smart, hypersensitive, and mordantly funny," in the words of Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman, Rose recounts her California childhood and her escape to New York, where she experiences intermittent periods of intense ambition and apathetic lethargy before finding a place with other "unemployables" at the magazine. She soon exchanged bon mots with the writers (at least the males) and recorded her favorite conversations on scraps of paper—and later in her memoir.

According to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, the result "is a compendious, enervating catalogue of snappy responses and witticisms between her and the men" on the New Yorker staff. Stacy Schiff, writing in the New York Times Book Review, concluded: "There is something regal about the gleaming, brittle, unhinged Rose, and if you want to hear two distinguished writers debating whether she was the princess or the duchess of the 20th century, you can do so here."