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(mostly) men who wrote for them were cocky and full of beans. They thought they had invented nonfiction, which they hadn’t, and they even thought they had invented hanging out together in restaurants and staying up late. It was an era when people really cared about magazines, when the arrival of a new
Esquire
on the newsstands was a bombshell, and it was seriously fun to be part of it. I became an
Esquire
writer. I wrote a column there, about women. In the world of print, the small world where I lived, I became a little bit famous.
    I had never met Lillian Ross, but I wondered about her from time to time. I’d read all her early work and admired it greatly, but she’d stopped doing bylined profiles and wrote mostly unsigned “Talk of the Town” pieces in
The New Yorker
. She was rumored to be having an affair with the editor of the magazine, William Shawn, and she seemed (from a distance) to have fallen under the evil spell of blandness that he’d cast over the magazine.
    At the time, there was a cold war in the magazine world, between those of us at
Esquire
and
New York
,and those of them at
The New Yorker
. They lived enviable lives—they had contracts and health insurance, and they could take months writing pieces; we, on the other hand, were always overextended and scrambling for dough. They were feigning modesty and disdaining success; we were self-aggrandizing and climbing the greasy pole. They were the anointed; we were pagans. They worshipped the famously reclusive “Mr. Shawn,” and they dropped his name in hushed tones as if he were the Ba‘al Shem Tov; we, on the other hand, jumped from Harold to Clay and back again. They thought we were egomaniacs; we thought they were weird.
    I was the sort of person Lillian Ross would hate, if she even knew who I was, or so it seemed to me one night in 1978 when I was pulled across a room to meet her. I was at a party at the home of Lorne Michaels, the producer of
Saturday Night Live
. Lillian Ross had been reporting a profile of Lorne for eight years. “You two must meet,” Lorne was saying, as he brought us together. I could see in an instant that Lillian Ross did not share this imperative. “You have so much in common,” he said, as he sat us down on the sofa.
    “It’s so nice to meet you,” I said.
    “And you,” she said.
    She was a tiny woman with short curly hair and bright blue eyes, and she smiled and waited for me to begin.
    I had one goal: to find out if my mother’s story wastrue and to find it out without giving anything away. I didn’t want Lillian Ross to know that she was a character in our family saga, and I didn’t want to betray my mother by giving away the fact that Ross had lingered on, in our home, for so many years after her cameo appearance there. I wanted my mother to win the duel, whether or not it had actually happened.
    But how to ask the question? “Is it true my mother threw you out of the house?” seemed a little bold. “I think you once met my mother” seemed coy, especially if Ross remembered the incident.
    I couldn’t figure out what to do.
    So I began by saying that I was a huge fan. She said thank you and waited for me to say something else. I took this to mean she’d never read anything I’d written, or that she hated my work, or perhaps—I was reaching for straws here—she had no idea that I was a writer.
    I asked her about her son and I told her about mine. It’s my experience that no one but your very close friends is truly interested in your children, but we went on pretending for a while.
    Then I asked her if she was still writing the profile of Lorne, as I’d heard. Yes, she said, she was. Another pause. It was clear that Lillian Ross was not even going to meet me halfway. I was starting to become irritated. Was it true that she was now in her eighth year of writing about Lorne, I asked. Yes, she was, she said. When do you think you’ll be done with it, I asked. I asked thisin what I hoped was an