Anne Roiphe
Over a four-decade career, Roiphe has proven so prolific that the critic Sally Eckhoff observed, "tracing Anne Roiphe's career often feels like following somebody through a revolving door: the requirements of keeping the pace can be trying." (Eckhoff described the writer as "a free-thinking welter of contradictions, a never-say-die feminist who's absolutely nuts about children"). Roiphe published her first novel, Digging Out, in 1967. Her second, Up The Sandbox (1970), became a national best-seller and made the author's career.
Roiphe has since published seven novels and two memoirs, while contributing essays and reviews to The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and others. In 1993, The New York Times described her as "a writer who has never toed a party line, feminist or otherwise." Her 1996 memoir Fruitful A memoir of Modem Motherhood was nominated for the National Book Award
From 1997 to 2002, she served as a columnist for The New York Observer. Her memoir Epilogue was published in 2008, and another memoir, Art and Madness, in 2011.
“I carried with me into the West End Bar, the White Horse Tavern, a long list of things I would never do: I would never have my hair set in a beauty parlor. I would never move to a suburb and bake cakes or make casseroles. I would never go to a country club dance, although I did like the paper lanterns casting rainbow colors on the terrace. I would never invest in the stock market. I would never play canasta. I would never wear pearls. I would love like a nursling but I would never go near a man who had a portfolio or a set of golf clubs or a business or even a business suit. I would only love a wild thing. I didn't care if wild things tended to break hearts. I didn't care if they substituted scotch for breakfast cereal. I understood that wild things wrote suicide notes to the gods and were apt to show up three hours later than promised. I understood that art was long and life was short.”
“A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.”
“You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.”
“Silence in the shell of a city, no baby crying, no car honking, no ambulance shrieking, no lovers moaning, no drunks throwing up in the alley, no lights, nothing but wind and rain and snow in its season and rust and a rattling of open doors and carcass smell. It was a possibility like a brain tumor or a scorpion bite.”