112. Rona Jaffe — The Best of Everything with Josh Lambert

KIM: Hey, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: Hello, lovers. Today, we’ve got a novel sure to appeal to any “Sex and the City” fans out there. Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel, The Best of Everything follows the adventures of four young, gorgeous, single women in New York City looking for love in all the wrong places. There’s a lot of drinking, dating, and drama, but beneath the surface of this dishy novel, there’s another story to be told. One that speaks, in hushed tones, of sexual predation endured by women in the workplace.

KIM: Yes, more than half a century prior to the #MeToo movement, Jaffe used her own experiences (and the experiences of other women) to call out the rampant chauvinism and sexual harassment in office culture (specifically, the publishing world), leaving many readers to wonder which real-life counterparts might have inspired Jaffe’s lechers and lotharios.

AMY: Our guest for today’s episode happens to have some useful insight into New York’s publishing world and how Jaffe’s smart and sexually frank bestseller (described as the “urban answer to Peyton Place”) fits into it. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro]

KIM: Our guest today, Josh Lambert, is an associate professor of English and the director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.

He teaches and writes about Jews and Jewishness with respect to the development of U.S. culture. Amy and I discovered the forgotten author Emma Wolf thanks to an article Josh wrote for Lilith magazine — we did an episode on Wolf with guest Sarah Seltzer as a result of seeing that article.

AMY: Josh wrote the award-winning book Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, which examines how Jews’ relationship with obscenity helped them gain cultural capital despite being a marginalized group. His latest work, The Literary Mafia, explores how and why Jews became ubiquitous literary gatekeepers in the publishing industry. Josh, welcome to the show!

JOSH: Thank you both so much. There is absolutely nothing I like better than talking about old neglected books, so I'm so glad to be here.

KIM: So the title of your recent book is a provocative one. Do you want to briefly describe the premise and why it's something you particularly wanted to tackle?

JOSH: Sure. Yeah. Thank you. It's called The Literary Mafia and I'll confess that I wanted a title that would draw people in, so that felt like a good one. But really it's a book where I tried to answer the question of why it matters that Jewish people had the opportunity to work in publishing and make decisions about what did and didn't get published. And when I started to unpack that question, some of the first voices that rose to the top were the voices of people like Truman Capote, who complained about a Jewish literary mafia and Jews having too much power and sneaking around and conspiring together. And obviously that's not what I found; there's no grand conspiracy, but I thought it's a useful way to reflect the fears people have about who gets to make decisions and who doesn't get to make decisions. And what I end up, you know, saying in the book is that we actually need more working together of people from minority backgrounds to give themselves opportunities to influence what happens in American publishing.

AMY: Got it. So Ronna Jaffe actually factors into the third chapter of your book, a chapter called “Shitty Media Men,” and you're actually alluding to something very specific with that heading, right? 

JOSH: Yeah, I was sort of working on that chapter around 2018 when there was a whole big discussion of this Shitty Medium Men list that a writer named Moira Donegan put together. There was a complicated situation of, you know, she did it anonymously. She was outed by people.It was a situation that really gave you an idea of the stakes of calling out, you know, men who've acted in criminal or sort of horrible ways. So I felt like that was useful in looking back at an earlier period.

KIM: Before we get into the ways Jaffe was exposing gender power dynamics, let's talk a little bit about how her book came about. Typically, you write a novel and then Hollywood comes calling for the film rights. But in Jaffe's case, it was actually the other way around. Do you want to tell us about that? Because it's pretty unusual.

JOSH: Yeah, it's an amazing sort of story and very strange, but basically, she was a recent college graduate. She was working at this paperback publishing company and she says she was visiting her friend who was working as the secretary to the editor in chief of Simon and Schuster when this Hollywood producer happened to be visiting, a guy named Jerry Wald. His plan, his project, was to create scenarios that he could use to make popular movies and then get novelists to write those books according to his scenarios. And he said he wanted a novel about working girls in New York and she basically more or less said, “Okay, I'll write you that novel.” And that's how the novel came to be, which is, you know, amazing, because she had the marketing muscle of a Hollywood studio behind her long before the novel was even published. 

AMY: So Jaffe was 27-years-old when this book was published, and I think getting launched to stardom in this way is like something we'd all dream about, right? But were there any downsides to this arrangement for her? 

JOSH: I mean, it is unusual, and almost a full year before her book is even published, there are newspaper articles about who's going to play which role in the movie based on her novel that hasn't even come out yet. So that's, I mean, an incredible amount of pressure and just like, incredibly weird. But the other stuff that I found is that she was treated a little bit like a Hollywood starlet you know? Her looks were fetishized, and there was, I think, you know, the sense of not giving her the same sort of serious consideration you'd give a typical debut literary novelist.

AMY: A huge amount of trust is put into this girl that she's going to be able to pull it off.

KIM: Yeah, like you said, it is a lot of pressure. So let's talk a little bit about the book's plot for our listeners. Josh, do you want to do the honors without giving too many spoilers or anything?

JOSH: Yeah, I think that fundamentally it's about a group of friends who meet at this office of a publishing company. One of them, Caroline, really aspires to rise in the publishing industry, but her friends, Gregg and April, um, maybe are a little more ambivalent. 

AMY: And Gregg is a girl, we should point out.

JOSH: That's true. Yeah. Um, uh, with two G's, I guess. But, um, I don't know how much more to say about the plot. There's not really a lot of focus on the nitty-gritty of publishing, you know. They mention it, but there's a bunch of office parties. There's a lot of their personal lives and their romantic relationships, and obviously a lot of pretty serious and intense things happen that maybe, you know, we should let the readers discover for themselves. It's a novel of disillusionment, right? The title is ironic. It's not the best of everything. And I think whatever experiences the women at the center of the novel have, it's about them discovering that the things that they wanted aren't really what they were cracked up to be, or there's a problem or something disappointing about it.

KIM: That's a great description. It's like you're going into it thinking you are going to have the best of everything, but then you find out the reality behind the curtain, kind of. 

AMY: One contemporary review of the book said “Every girl who reads this is going to feel a shock of recognition.” And I think the way Jaffe does that is by having these four very different women, kind of like Sex in the City. It's sort of like, which one are you most?

KIM: Mm-hmm. Are you a Charlotte? Are you a…?

AMY: Yeah, they have different personality traits. One's more of like a Midwestern kind of yokel… very naive.

KIM: You gotta have that. 

AMY: You gotta have that one. Another one is like, more sexually charged, uh, daring. You have a single mother, which was interesting, like a divorcee with a young child. There's something for everybody to relate to.

JOSH: Although you'd want to say they're not really very diverse. They're all white women.

AMY: Yes, that's true.

KIM: That's absolutely true, yeah. And as you point out in your book too, it wasn't really until the Eighties that that kind of changed in publishing. 

AMY: Yeah, which we'll get to later on in the episode, yeah.

KIM: So Amy usually reads because she has a beautiful reading voice, but I'm gonna read the opening because I love it. I think it really sets the scene. It kind of gets you in the zone. So here I go. 

[reads opening paragraphs]

Amy, aren't you gonna start singing “Let the River Run?”

AMY: What? 

JOSH: The opening theme from Working Girl, right? 

KIM: It totally makes me think of that! All the women going to work and their outfits. 

AMY: So what I thought of when I read that was the episode we did on Rose Macaulay, because she starts her book in almost exactly the same way on a subway talking about working girls and what they're wearing. It's so similar. So that's really what came to mind for me. 

KIM: I love that you remembered that. That's exactly right. 

AMY: Yeah. So anyway, it's a great way to start and also, it feels right away, instantly aspirational, right? Like, if you're a young woman anywhere in the country who dreams of moving to a big city, you're already hooked. In my case, I can remember being that girl. I moved to LA from the Midwest to work at a magazine when I was 21. I was living with other girls who worked for the same magazine. We had no money. So this instantly transported me back to that time in my life. Even though I was West Coast, there were a lot of similarities. 

KIM: Same.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. The one major difference is that I, at 21 years old, was not preoccupied with getting married at that point. The women in this book kind of are. So, Josh, can you talk about the contrast that Jaffe poses in this book? We have women with professional aspirations versus the women who are biding their time until they can find a husband.

JOSH: Yeah. And it is, I think, such an important part of the history of this moment. Like part of what I wanted to write about in the book was the Fifties and Sixties where this moment where women did get more opportunities in publishing, but this presumption that women would marry young and that that was their primary interest complicated their experiences so much. And you know, I think it was true in a social history sense that a lot of women got married very young to get out of their houses, to get opportunities to be able to live in apartments that weren't with their families. And I think that what the novel is really careful to show is how much that stands in the way of women's professional opportunities because it's so easy for a man to look at a woman and say, “You don't really care about this. This doesn't really matter to you. All you care about is getting married.” And, there's a speech in the book, uh, fairly late in the book where a man that one of the protagonists, Caroline, has been dating, sort of says it to her very explicitly, he says: “What the hell have you got to be so serious about? Where is it all going to lead you? It's one thing to enjoy your job. Every girl should have something to do until she's married, but you live with it every minute of the day. You take work home, you worry about office politics. You let Miss Farrow get you down. If you ask me, I think you'd like to have her job eventually.” And Caroline says, like, “Yeah, I would!” And he says, “You're much too ambitious. And the worst of it is you're fighting with windmills. If you had talents as an opera singer or something else, I'd say it was unavoidable. But you're knocking yourself out for a third rate little publishing company.” 

KIM: Ouch! 

JOSH: What's incredible about it, by the way, is like, that's the perception. And in her next speech, Caroline says back to him, [paraphrased] But it's no different for you. You're like a law student. Like, who cares? There's gonna be a million other lawyers who can take your job. Why is it any less meaningful that I want to do this work? The problem is she sees around her so many other women who really do see marriage as the path forward. 

AMY: And you mentioned this Ms. Farrow in that quote. We should talk about her for a second because she's kind of an older woman in the book who has had success at the publishing company who is single. She's not a central character, but you know, she winds up leaving the job because she is going to go get married.

KIM: And she's very judged by everyone. I mean, she's the one actually kind of making it, but she's judged pretty harshly by everyone.

JOSH: Right. For being someone who's committed to her professional goal. People use nasty words to describe her in a way that I think happened to many, many women who broke boundaries in that generation.

AMY: And we'll talk about the movie version of this book later, but Joan Crawford plays Ms. Farrow and does a good job of it, I think. Um, so to quote from a 2020 New Yorker Review written by Michelle Moses, “This book, The Best of Everything, is what you would get if you took ‘Sex in the City’ and set it inside ‘Mad Men's’ universe.” That's like a perfect way of describing it. The scenes that take place in the office or the coworker happy hours or the corporate picnic, all of that office stuff is just as intriguing as watching the girls' love affairs unfold. And you're right, Josh, she doesn't get too much into the nitty-gritty of the work itself, but you see the office politics and everything that's going on socially in the office, and it's a lot of fun.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And she doesn't sugarcoat things. The book is really honest in a way that reading it now actually feels really modern. Josh, your book posits that the predominantly Jewish powers-that-be in the literary world ended up shaping the literary tastes of America. Meanwhile, in Jaffe's book, Fabian Publishing produces cheap dime store paperbacks. But there's a scene where the editor in chief, Mr. Shalimar, echoes a similar idea.

AMY: Yeah, he tells newcomer Caroline, our protagonist, “We are responsible for the changing literary tastes of America. It's our books with our sexy covers and our low cost and our mass distribution that are teaching America how to read.” And so I thought that was interesting because it's a similar idea to what you're, you know, saying in your book.

JOSH: And I mean, I think it's part of why that moment in literary history is so interesting. Twenty years before that, if you wanted a book, you'd have to go to a bookstore. But in the Fifties and the Sixties, there were books at the checkout counter, at every drugstore, and everywhere you would go. And those books sometimes were very trashy, but sometimes they were the books that changed Americans' minds about race or the environment or something really important. So it is like a really fascinating moment for thinking about how literature affects the society at large.

AMY: Yeah. And what gets chosen. Yeah. So let's talk about this Fabian editor in chief, Mr. Shalimar, a little bit more. He's basically a lecherous old man. He can't keep his hands off the ladies of the secretary pool. Josh, we're gonna have you recount some of his predatory greatest hits, if you will.

JOSH: Okay. And I'm happy to do that. And I do think maybe like we should just mention to the listeners of the podcast that I'm gonna be reading moments that are, uh, basically sexual assault. So if you aren't into that, it might be a good idea to skip a minute or two. Um, but yeah, part of what impresses me about the novel is how sort of intense these moments feel. So, you know, the first moment we get introduced to him doing this kind of thing, it's with this woman, April, who's been assigned to be his secretary for the day. And he keeps her late at the office. And then there's a moment where he grabs her and the quote is, “His arms were like straps around her so that she could hardly breathe and his mouth covered her as hot and violent and authoritative. She was filled with terror.” So, you know, in terms of describing what workplace sexual harassment looks like, that actually gives you a sense of the real traumatic intensity of it. Um, there's another scene that's funnier and sort of like, also very disturbing, but I think hopefully a little less distressing, which is at an office Christmas party. Shalimar gets very drunk and he crawls under a table to look at the legs of one of the women, of Barbara. And at this point in the novel, he's already starting to lose his sense of authority. People are finding out about what he's like, and so everyone's laughing at him, but it's a pretty indelible image of this guy under a table with his legs sticking out, pawing at a woman's legs.

AMY: Do we know who this guy is supposed to represent in real life? Does he have a real-life counterpart that Jaffe was trying to signal?

JOSH: So, I mean, to me that's what's so striking that, you know, we know where Jaffe worked after college at a publisher called Fawcett and at their paperback line called Gold Medal Books, and the editor in chief was this guy William Lengel, who by all accounts seems to have been the model for Mr. Shalimar. Now, we don't know exactly that Lengel did these things, but it seems like Jaffe's account is based on that.

AMY: And you kind of bring up in your chapter in the book, and I think it's an interesting one, that in a way he's kind of made to look like an old dinosaur and it does almost become comic by the end. But you say in your book that that's kind of where the power lies for these women is being able in discussing it. So after the Christmas party, the women are able to all kind of gather around Barbara and be like, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry, that's just, that's how he is.” But in talking about it and making it public, he becomes a laughing stock, right? It takes his power away in some ways.

JOSH: The line in the novel is “Every girl who had been pinched or kissed by Mr. Shalimar had come forth to add her story to the office gossip,” and then quote, “No one in the office was afraid of Mr. Shalimar anymore.” They all thought of him as a rather pathetic, lecherous old man, right? So the power of sharing these stories gives some relief to the women who have to deal with this behavior because they have solidarity and they have some way of resisting it.

AMY: Yeah, and I think there was also like an understanding from all the women in the novel, and I think it would've been true of any career woman of the time that like their sex, their gender, and how men perceive them is inseparable from their job. Today we are able to keep that very distinct, but they sort of had to deal with those in tandem, so when you read those examples of the harassment, it did sound very true to life and very real. Um, and the reason for that might be because Jaffe really did her research in writing this book. She wound up interviewing a lot of different ladies, and I'll quote from that New Yorker review that I referenced earlier “In order to write it, Jaffe interviewed 50 women about the things nobody spoke about in polite company: losing their virginities, getting abortions, being sexually harassed. ‘I thought that if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile,’ Jaffe wrote in the forward to the 2005 reissue of her novel. Put simply, she wanted it to say ``Me Too.”

KIM: Yeah, and I kind of felt like cheering for her and I feel like cheering for her right now. It seems like a really brave thing for a woman to do just starting out in her career like she was. And we should also point out that Jaffe herself was Jewish, but she doesn't really mention Jewishness in the novel. Josh, do you have any theories as to why.

JOSH: Yeah, I think I would explain it in two ways. One is that a lot of the Jews who went to work in publishing were happy to sort of not make that the center of their identity. They might not have just wanted to do that. And the other is that there's a phenomenon in the Fifties, particularly, of taking Jewishness out of let's say, a novel that was adapted to film, that the characters in the novel might be Jewish, but in the film version they would just be sort of unmarked, you know, white Americans. And I think that because Jaffe's novel was already predestined to become a film, there might have been a sense of like, let's not get into that minority representation stuff. Let's make it a sort of quote unquote “popular” novel for everybody.

KIM: Mm, Interesting. Okay.

AMY: When you're reading the book though, you do feel like, “Oh man, she must be drawing on real personal stories here that have happened to her,” like on, on bad dates or, you know, all the kind of stuff that happens with the men. Um, and so it is a roman a clef in a sense, but I don't think her backstory, her upbringing really applies to any women in the novel. So can you kind of fill us in on what that upbringing was?

JOSH: Yeah, I think you're right that none of them is an exact portrait of her. She was born in 1931. She was an only child. Um, what I think is one of the most interesting things about her is her grandfather was a really successful builder who built the Carlisle Hotel. So she grew up, from what I've heard, in sort of a very wealthy family and that makes sense with her going to Radcliffe, which was mostly a thing that people of real privilege did. Um, oh, another thing about her grandfather is I read somewhere that he was the first Jew to live in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is kind of an amazing thing, whether it's true or not. But I think, you know, there's a way in which Caroline, the character in the novel who has just graduated from Radcliffe, probably shares some of her background with the novelist. We get a sense, I think, that some of the characters grew up with a fair amount of privilege in their background, but we don't really get, like, exactly the picture that we might get of, you know, reading about, uh, Jaffe's biography.

AMY: Right. Nobody's coming from the Upper West Side or wherever she was living in New York. 

KIM: I feel like Jaffe has a wonderful anthropologist’s eye when it comes to dating. She has so much commentary on men and women where you're just like, “Yeah, yeah.” It felt really relevant to my own dating experience.

AMY: And it's comedy, most of it, you know? There are definitely tough moments in the book, but a lot of the dating stuff, um, the eye-roll kind of things are so funny. If you remember from a previous episode where I told my story about somebody wanted to set me up with a guy because he liked pizza and they knew I liked pizza too, and it was like so random and dumb… Jaffe has a version of that, uh, that I'll read. She's writing about Caroline here. “There were dozens of utterly mismatched blind dates she had been inflicted with in the past two years. A sentence at hard labor, starting with the words, usually uttered by some nice older woman who hardly knew her or the boy, ‘I know a nice young man for you to meet.’ These amateur matchmakers seem to think the mere fact that Caroline wore a skirt and the man wore pants was enough to make them want to hurl themselves into each other's arms.” So that's the kind of comedy we're dealing with. Also, the amount of drinking that they were all doing in this novel, like I almost felt like I had a hangover every time I put the book down for a second because they were really going at it

KIM: I love that you said that. That's perfect. . 

AMY: This book really is 100% the sort of thing you'd wanna curl up with alongside pint of Haagen Dazs, I think, or better yet, a martini, But, I don't think you could categorize it under the “trashy romance” heading, and unfortunately I think it has been to a certain degree. I think it has literary merit, but it's been overlooked a bit, especially today, because of it being a woman's novel, quote unquote. What do you guys think?

JOSH: I mean, I think definitely it's partly like that categorization of a “woman's novel” and also the popularity of it, right? Like a book that was so popular and turned into a movie, I think is a little bit harder at times for people to take seriously. I don't know if that makes sense as the way to understand it. I'm curious what you think.

KIM: Well, yeah, definitely. And then even, um, the way you sent us the videos of the “Playboy Penthouse” episodes that she was, I guess she was in the first episode of that, it was like from the very beginning, they were trying to make it trashy in a way. Maybe to sell it. 

AMY: Let's just tell listeners what that was. So Hugh Hefner started a television show called “The Playboy Penthouse,” and it was sort of like a talk show slash variety show. He'd have like a handful of maybe five or six people that would come on the show for the hour, and they'd all be sitting around this fake living room with a bunch of playmate women lounging around. Hugh’s smoking a pipe, looking ridiculous, and in the very first episode, Ronna Jaffe was one of the guests.

KIM: It's so ironic. They put her in a situation that's basically her book almost,and you're watching it play out. And these men and the way they're acting, and they won’t even look at…

AMY: Oh my God. What was his name? Lenny Bruce. He wouldn't even look at the clip [of her movie]. 

KIM: Oh, I know. He was so condescending. 

JOSH: It's just all weird. I've never taught the novel, but I want to teach it just to show that in class. 

AMY: Yeah, 

KIM: You have to. Yeah. 

AMY: It was like “hepcat” overload. 

JOSH: Yeah. 

KIM: And they tried to needle her about the book and the movie and the soapiness of it.

AMY: And she kept pushing back and I loved that.

KIM: Yeah, she was great.

JOSH: I mean, and it's really astonishing to me, like one of the things that struck me the most is she says at one moment she was writing it for girls out there who might feel alone. And she specifically mentions April at that moment and April (I don't know if the spoiler is too much) but April has an abortion, and on TV in 1959, she is all but explicitly saying if you have had an abortion, you do not have to feel alone. And that's like an incredible thing to do in 1959.

KIM: Yeah, and with those men there just kind of making light of all of it and being very, I thought they were very, um, patronizing and condescending. 

AMY: Yeah. 100%. And also the abortion aspect, they removed from the film. She miscarries, I think, in the movie. It's not an actual decision to have an abortion, which I thought was interesting. They didn't want to touch that, but Jaffe did. 

JOSH: No, because right, this is years before not just Roe v Wade, but Griswold, which makes birth control constitutionally protected. It is not a great time to be needing reproductive health services in America.

KIM: Yeah. And we'll link to the videos and the show notes for this episode. You should definitely go watch those, listeners. It's really incredible to see her. 

AMY: She could hold her own with those guys, but she's just also really cute. 

KIM: Way to make it about her looks!

AMY: Oh, I know, but she is! You know what though, I think it's interesting because a lot of the Lost Ladies that we cover, there's no video footage of, so I'm always fascinated when we can actually go see them and hear them talk instead of just seeing an old black and white photo from like 1880. It helps you get to know her a little bit. 

KIM: But it, it also makes me think of in your book, Josh, where you talk about how women were saying, and I think women that she maybe talked about in her interviews and stuff too, were pointing out that their looks were an important part of everything that they were projecting, and it was a part of their job too, like you pointed out, Amy, almost. It was inseparable, basically. 

JOSH: Yeah, I mean, and you feel it watching that TV clip, just because you get the sense of, as difficult as it is to feel like she has to somehow navigate in a world in which there are like playmates walking around and hold her own and try to get intellectual respect. It sort of makes palpable, like who among us could possibly keep it together in that environment. It's amazing. 

AMY: Yeah. And it also reminded me, Kim … remember the Lorraine Hansberry episode? Um, so Lorraine Hansberry did a famous episode with Mike Wallace where he was trying to needle her and he was trying to throw her off and, um, she held her own. And it's the same level of determination of both of those women in these clips.

KIM: Yep. So I'm thinking, um, with this discussion that maybe the time is right for a resurgence of this book, and Penguin Classics is actually releasing a new edition. It has an introduction by Rachel Syme, and that's coming out in March, 2023. I'm hoping that is going to really bring a lot of new readers to the best of everything. 

AMY: The film version did come out in 1959 starring Joan Crawford as the seasoned Ms. Farrow, and then a young Robert Evans played one of the bachelor cads. I felt like reading the book was a much richer experience, but I liked the film. They really did capture the essence of what she was going for. I thought the casting was great. 

JOSH: Yeah, the music is a little bit much, sort of old-fashiondy, but I don't hate it. It sort of feels like it speaks to that moment. But also, there's something about it that had to work because the whole idea of the novel was to make the film possible, like it was all one multi-platform marketing situation. 

AMY: Yeah, and “Mad Men” is one of my favorite TV series of all times, so the look is very “Mad Men,” like the office design and everything. I felt like Peggy from “Mad Men” was going to walk into the movie at any given point. Um, so yeah, worth seeing, but definitely read the novel first. You'll get so much more out of it.

KIM: So after being launched to insta-success as a result of this novel, where did Jaffe go from there in terms of her writing? Josh, have you read any other books by her? What can you tell us?

JOSH: So I haven't read that much of her other stuff, unfortunately, I'm, I'm embarrassed to say that. I would really like to, but I know she wrote a lot. She wrote about a dozen novels and a lot of them were on the same formula of taking a particular setting and then having a group of people, mostly women, show their different experiences to give a sense of what that was. She did one about college roommates and what they went on to do, or her follow up to this was about a group of couples who go to live for a period in Brazil. Um, the book that sometimes people have heard of, or her other book that like is, is most well-known, is a weird book she wrote in the Eighties, sort of a sensational novel about Dungeons and Dragons when there was a worry that kids were killing themselves by playing role-playing games. And the reason people know about that is that it was made into a movie called Mazes and Monsters that stars a young Tom Hanks. So it is just like a weird little pop culture strange thing. It's a little bit unfortunate because I don't think there's really any threat from Dungeons and Dragons.

AMY: Right, Right. It's like you kind of didn't need her to go there.

KIM: Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't expect that. Um, so, Rona Jaffe passed away in 2005 at the age of 74, but not before establishing the Rona Jaffe Foundation. It provided grants to emerging female writers from 1995 until 2020. And that seemed so in keeping with the spirit of her book. It’s really great that she did that.

AMY: Yeah, she recognized that it was gonna take women, you know, lending their assistance and their expertise to other women coming up the chain, so I love that. So Josh, we actually focused on Jaffe’s whisper novel for this episode, but in your book, there are a few other authors that you talk about who were also doing the same sort of thing. One is the 1973 novel Dickie’s List by Anne Burstein, Which I have not yet read, um, but the other one you mentioned is the 1984 book, Elbowing The Seducer by T. Gertler. The T stands for Trudy. So both of those books are out of print, but I was intrigued when you suggested them. So I found T. Gertler’s book at the library and I want to recommend it to everybody because, you know, we obviously didn't have time to cover two full authors on this show, but I thought the writing was so sharp on this one. Kim, I think I texted you like, “You have to read this too!” 

KIM: I can't wait to read it now. Yeah. 

AMY: Well, first of all, it’s extremely racy. Very sexy, but also very biting and funny satire. Um, it's also interesting because it's a roman a clef within a roman a clef. So the main character is a young woman who ends up writing a novel about her affairs with an editor of a high-brow literary magazine. Gertler herself swore that this book was total fiction, but readers in the literary know sort of had their ideas on this, right, Josh?

JOSH: Right. So this is the complicated thing I do in this chapter where as much as people might object to it, I really think it's important to listen to these women writers who are writing about harassment or like, just like mistreatment, um, and using fiction as a way to do it. I think that's an important way for us to know about what it was really like to be in the business in those years. Not to take anything away from Gertler as a fiction writer, because I agree with you, it's like an unbelievably sharp and just incredible novel, but I think that some of the characters who we know she based that on went on to like be pretty shitty, lecherous men in the industry for decades afterwards. And it's strange to me that it really took a long time and, and really even until now, it's very hard to find people who actually are willing to say, “Oh yeah, she had worked with these particular editors and they had probably treated her in these ways.”

KIM: Wow.

AMY: You can understand her just being like, “Yep, all made up.” 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: She wanted to say it, but she also didn't want to take all the heat.

KIM: Yeah. And the people who know, know. 

JOSH: What's incredible about it is the character inside the novel says the exact same thing, right? Like the character says, “Oh yeah, yeah, I made it all up in the book,” inside the book! 

AMY: So she is basically telling everyone. Isn't there even a little thing at the beginning? 

JOSH: The epigraph. It’s a quote from David Letterman. “If you accept the premise, you'll enjoy the bit.” It's so cool. It's her saying, right, like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is all made up, right?”

AMY: Yeah. Exactly.

KIM: Wink-wink. Yeah. Okay, so Josh, in the conclusion of your book, you say we need more literary mafias. Can you explain what you mean by that?

JOSH: Yeah, I think, you know, what I got out of studying the history of Jews in the publishing industry is that there was certainly no evil collusion or anything like that, but it really helped Jews out a lot to know that there might be other people from this minority group who would help them out or who would give their work a chance. And I think that when I see discussions of diversity in publishing, and I hope anyone listening to this knows the problems in the publishing industry, that it is way too white and has been for way too long, um, one of the things that troubles me is when I hear people say, “Oh, well what we should do is just not pay attention to race and ethnicity at all and just, like, pick the best work and just like care about merit.” Because I think what that does is it says that people from minority groups shouldn't be helping each other. What we really need is a system that allows people from groups that have been disenfranchised or minoritized or discriminated against, those people need to have the opportunity to help each other. What Ronna Jaffe knew is that women needed to help other women. They needed to talk to each other, they needed to support each other, and they needed to have each other's backs in order to overcome all the discrimination they were facing. That's exactly what needs to happen now. For all the groups who haven't had a chance to like have those influential rules in publishing.

KIM: I love that, and I agree completely.

AMY: Yeah. It's been so enlightening to get to talk to you about all of this. Ronna Jaffe’s The Best of Everything was such a fun read. I can't believe I'd never read it. It's one of those now that you know, you have a lot of friends that are like, “Oh, toss me a book recommendation.I need something.” And I sort of have my go-to ones that I say. This is one of my new go-to ones, because I think a lot of people don't know it. Despite the sobering truths that the book presents to us, there's so much fun also interwoven in the story. So Josh, thanks so much for joining us to put it all in perspective.

JOSH: Oh my God, it is such a pleasure for me. I like nothing better than being able to talk about an old book, so I hope I'll have a chance to do it again with you all. I love what you're doing.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. We'll be back next week. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.