‘Better Than Sane’ is the most glamorous memoir you’ll read this year

On one of those early June afternoons when the weather in Washington is like a kettle recently off the stove, I found myself on the covered terrace of a cafe, almost involuntarily proselytizing to a friend about the book I was reading. “It is the only memoir that really needed to be written,” I told her. I was speaking about “Better Than Sane: Tales From a Dangling Girl,” by the model-turned-actress-turned-New Yorker-writer Alison Rose, which was published to little notice in 2004, soon fell out of print and is now, thankfully, being reissued by Godine.

“She is incredible,” I said, volume rising, words speeding up. “When she’s a child, she has a crush on Gardner McKay, the handsomest actor who ever lived. Then she meets him when she’s grown up. They become best friends! He casts her in a play that he wrote where she plays a mentally disabled boy. They screened it on PBS! Things like that just keep happening to her. She’s the hottest person you’ve never heard of.”

As I spoke, a man who’d been working on his computer nearby kept turning to glare at me. He finally made a show of pressing a button on his keyboard and broke in. “Can you be a little quieter?” he demanded. “I’m on a Zoom call. They can hear everything you’re saying.” I inarticulately huffed that we were in a public space and he could simply mute himself when he wasn’t speaking. But what I should have said was: Let them listen! I’m doing them a favor by telling them about this book. And they’ll be doing themselves a favor when they read it.

“Better Than Sane” is the most glamorous book you will read this year. If you read it next year, that will still be true. If you were one of the few who read it in 2004, read it again. Rose’s natural glamour is of the slightly sorrowful kind Lana Del Rey aspires, sometimes successfully, to convey. But in her memoir, Rose also exudes a glamour of the kind some fairies in folklore possess: a beguiling but slightly illusory beauty that perhaps disguises a still more compelling ugliness, after which we can only ever wonder.

You glimpse the enchanting asymmetry of Rose’s way of being in her prose. Take this sentence, from the preface, in which she is describing her room on East 68th Street in New York: “A man I had a lot of — or some — sex with there, a doleful rock-and-roll icon with the prettiest mouth (his music is still upsettingly on the radio all the time), told me that the room looked like New Orleans.” This tottering stack of words shouldn’t hold up but somehow does, like those mysterious sculptures of bent branches and broken twigs one sometimes discovers in the deep woods. What are we to make of that interruptive, contradictory “or some”? And who (this is a question one routinely asks as Rose careens through the frequently anonymized men of Hollywood and Manhattan) is that unnamed rock-and-roller?

Rose grew up in the Bay Area. She was born to wealthy parents in the 1940s, her father a prominent psychiatrist who was an early proponent of psychopharmaceuticals. The scenes of her childhood — including her “first love,” a collection of sharpened pencils imbued with individual personalities — sometimes resemble a Wes Anderson film in which women, for once, have inner lives. “My mother and father seemed like two separate entities in our house,” she writes, “so to me marriage was a state and a house was a place where people who are wittily mean to each other live in an isolated way.”

Though Rose herself never marries in the book, and never gets beyond merely playing house — or, sometimes, sleeping in parks — she was romantically involved with a thick catalogue of men throughout her life. Among her most notable paramours was Burt Lancaster’s son Bill, screenwriter of “The Bad News Bears” and “The Thing,” whom she met in the early ’70s after moving out to Los Angeles to audition for a movie helmed by a famous French director that subsequently fell apart. As she does with many of the men in her life, she refers to the younger Lancaster almost exclusively by a nickname, Billy the Fish, “because it was as if he lived in his own element, as if the air that other people breathed were different from whatever he breathed.”

In the ’80s, after returning to New York, Rose talked her way into a job as a receptionist at the New Yorker, which she calls “School,” on the grounds that “I wrote notes to the boys — long letters, more often than not — and they wrote back.” In her telling, she became entangled with seemingly the entire male writing staff — especially Harold Brodkey, “perhaps the king of all my old boyfriends,” and George Trow, “who was my absolute favorite” — before (and after) rising to the level of writer herself, partly on the basis of her collaborations with Brodkey and Trow.

Rose describes her affairs and assignations with wistful wit, bending ordinary language into bands around her bare ring finger. “Sometimes a wishy surprise can come out of adultery,” she writes at one point, a phrase whose pleasure derives as much from its playful transmutation of “wish” into an adjective as from the sly wickedness of its sentiment. The subtext of all of this is, of course, that Rose is absurdly beautiful, though she mostly declines to admit as much herself, preferring instead to quote a long parade of men and women who tell her so. “Most of what I wrote down of what people said to me was, of course, flattery,” she says of the copious notes that she took during her time at the magazine. “The flattering things seemed true when these people said them.”

That sounds like a humblebrag, and it is, but it touches on Rose’s tendency to write about herself as if she were, even to herself, a shimmering mirage beyond the dunes. Though she turns every sentence masterfully, her narrative sometimes seems beholden to the cryptic logic of dreams. On one occasion, she writes, “I actually found a beautiful young man, in front of our apartment, passed out drunk.” She brings him in and suddenly they are coupled off, and they stay that way for ages. In another city at another time, her relationship with Billy the Fish ends traumatically, and she never quite tells us how they got there, leaving us to wonder about her comparison of him, much earlier, to her father, “a bully and a tyrant and some kind of handsome star and completely depressed and droll.” Later, she is packing up her office at the New Yorker, and only the presence of her friend Renata Adler — who published an arguably premature book in 1999 about the “last days” of the magazine — hints at why.

These elisions can be frustrating, despite the book’s many pleasures. It can also be maddening that Rose remains a slightly phantasmal presence in her own story, still the girl who wondered, at 8 years old, whether she “was a living thing or not,” only to be told by her mother: “Well, maybe you can be put to sleep for a while. They put animals to sleep.” One longs, sometimes, for her to stop flitting away behind the aphoristic words of her friends and lovers to say what’s really wrong, what she’s really feeling, but it’s not clear that she wants to. “Better Than Sane” is not, or is not simply, a memoir of mental health crises, though it is haunted by them. Neither is it a story of confidence, clarity and hard-earned wisdom.

It is, however, a perfect book; not in the way that gemstones are, but in the way that a Saturday can be. This is the rare sort of memoir that invites you into a world beneath our own, a secret commonwealth made possible by Rose’s spiky genius and irresistible magnetism. It deserves to be reveled in, returned to and, if you are anything like me, enthusiastically and loudly shared. There are treasures here on every page, sometimes an unforgettable quip and sometimes just a joyful little encounter with a pet. Above it all there is Rose herself, as adventurous and unhinged as Titania, friend to movie stars and poets, glamorous precisely because she is possibly unreal.

Tales From a Dangling Girl

By Alison Rose

Godine. 246 pp. $18.95

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