
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