In case you somehow missed it, The Best of Everything was a novel by Rona Jaffe about the lives of four, or was it five, single women in New York; it was pretty good trash, as trash goes, which is not why I am fond of it. I liked it because it seemed to me that it caught perfectly the awful essence of being a single woman in a big city. False pregnancies. Real pregnancies. Abortions. Cads. Dark bars with married men. Rampant masochism. I remember particularly a sequence in the book where one of the girls, rejected by a lover, goes completely bonkers and begins spending all her time spying on him, poking through his garbage for discarded love letters and old potato peelings; ultimately, as I recall, she falls from his fire escape to her death. The story seemed to me only barely exaggerated from what I was seeing around me, and, I am sorry to say, doing myself. I was, naturally, single when I read the novel, unhappily single, mired in the Dorothy Parker telephone-call syndrome (“Please, God, let him telephone me now.… I’ll count five hundred by fives, and if he hasn’t called me then, I will know God isn’t going to help me, ever again.
