Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason

George Plimpton slept with Anne Roiphe and forgot about it. Doc Humes would show up on her doorstep late at night—then walked out of her life forever. Recalling her intimate encounters with another literary Olympian, William Styron, Roiphe writes, “I try to say interesting things to him. His eyes are always far away as if he were staring at me across a muddy river where the mist never lifts.”

Call it the fog of gender war. Even if the introspective young narrator of Roiphe’s sex-trophy memoir, Art and Madness, can come across as a glutton for punishment, her experience of the hard-partying

fiction Dec/Jan 2011

Exit, Carefully

Early in A Voice from Old New York, a posthumous memoir by Louis Auchincloss, who died last January, the author relates, in typically breezy manner, an anecdote about “my richest friend and contemporary, Marshall Field IV.” The Chicago newspaperman’s death in 1965, from a drug overdose, was the result of Field’s “tragic inheritance,” writes Auchincloss. He’s not referring to the hand-me-down wealth and privilege that so often hollow out great families, but to the “nervous troubles” that plagued Field’s father and presumably led his grandfather to suicide. “The story of the Fields is like that