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Books|Alison Rose, The New Yorker’s Femme Fatale, Dies at 81
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/books/alison-rose-dead.html
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She started as the magazine’s glamorous receptionist and became one of its more singular writers. In one of her last articles, she memorialized her time (and lovers) there.
Oct. 18, 2025Updated 3:21 p.m. ET
Alison Rose, a beguiling, if inept, receptionist at The New Yorker who found her way into the magazine’s pages with her idiosyncratic essays and profiles — including one particular article about her time there and the men who were her mentors and lovers that landed like a small grenade and became the beguiling memoir “Better Than Sane: Tales From a Dangling Girl” — died in late September at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 81.
The author Honor Moore, a friend, said the cause and exact date of Ms. Rose’s death were not known.
Ms. Rose was 41 when she arrived at The New Yorker. She was beautiful, bright and hapless, having careened through her previous decades, and between New York and California, trying to find a place in the world. She had worked, or tried to work, as an actor and a model. She was nearly photographed for Vogue, but had a habit of canceling bookings at the last minute, frozen with anxiety and the aftereffects of binge eating.
She typed manuscripts for Gardner McKay, the heartthrob actor turned author and drama critic. Later, she worked as a temporary typist at, by her count, 128 different offices.
She had a disastrous long-term relationship with Bill Lancaster, a son of Burt Lancaster, the conclusion of which kept her inside, sleeping on a roommate’s sofa, for the better part of a year. Her psychiatrist prescribed Valium; her psychiatrist father prescribed speed.
Ms. Rose’s closest literary sister was Eve Babitz, who did her own careening. But unlike Ms. Babitz, Ms. Rose was not exactly a voluptuary. Self-abnegation was her default state.
Landing the receptionist’s job on 18 — the writers’ floor of The New Yorker, which was then still in its longtime home on West 45th Street — was a coup, though she was aided by Brendan Gill, a family friend.
