In 1985, when she was 40, Alison Rose took a receptionist job at the New Yorker, for which she would eventually contribute "Talk of the Town" pieces. Her time at the storied magazine is part of the territory she covers in Better than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, which comprises 12 personal essays that are, by turns, funny, vivacious, and bleak. Better than Sane, originally published in 2004, seems to have been written with the hindsight of a wistful nostalgic. Following Rose's amused and amusing reflections on her privileged Palo Alto, Calif., childhood, the book proceeds in the promising-young-woman-takes-Manhattan vein. Rose offers filigreed details of her physical environment while chronicling her friendships, romances, breakups, and ensuing depressive episodes. When she lands her New Yorker job, it somewhat unnerves her, as a reliable self-saboteur: "I wasn't entirely comfortable about having got what I wanted. I was breaking my own rules."
Some readers will find Rose's preoccupation with male approval knotty: "Whatever he wanted me to do, I did it" is not an atypical line. But at times Rose swerves from doormat-like compliance to burgeoning feminism; on the stigma attached to being a single woman, she writes, "It's exhausting to be in the company of married people... it forces me into a state of emergency alert, in which I have to rescue myself from interrogation and public disgrace." If Nora Ephron had applied her wit and acuity to the lifestyle celebrated in Sex and the Single Girl, it might have read something like Better than Sane. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer