"With her piled up blonde hairdo bent over the telephone messages she wrote by hand, Groth served for years in an aquarium-like booth as gatekeeper for a talented, tight-knit, rapscallion community. In this evocative memoir she is exuberantly frank about her young self, fresh from the Corn Belt, discovering sex and the city through two vanished mid-century worlds: The New Yorker of editor William Shawn and Bohemian Greenwich Village."-Kennedy Fraser, former New Yorker writer and author of Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women's Lives

"What a superb book. Beautifully written, so very frank, and with many insights into the world of magazine publishing. I can see a film, in the tradition of the one based on Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything."-Foster Hirsch, author of The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

"I truly loved this book and can't stop thinking about it. Janet Groth's stories of life at The New Yorker-during the golden age of William Shawn, Joseph Mitchell, Muriel Spark, and a host of others-is a memoir in the true, old-fashioned sense of the term: The story of a remarkable life, populated with equally remarkable characters. Ms. Groth provides sharp and very personal insight into some of the greatest writers of the last century, as well as a fascinating look inside the magazine that has shaped American culture like no other. But she also provides something very different, but equally transfixing: The poignant narrative of her own coming of age, as a woman, a writer, and a thinker-and, ultimately, the sort of wry iconoclast who would produce this lovely, moving, and utterly engrossing book."-Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age