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In the same “Fiction Chronicle,” Elizabeth also delivered a harsh verdict on a story collection by the “mercilessly pretentious” Anaïs Nin. While granting her “a fierce foolishness that is not without beauty as an act,” Elizabeth snatched away this grudging praise by adding, “it is too bad her perf…

During these years Elizabeth had a string of lovers in New York—two affairs resulted in abortions, one of which she alluded to in Sleepless Nights61—but none were serious enough for her to contemplate marriage, and some of the men were already married. (The “Alex” of the novel is likely a composite…

Little is known about Elizabeth’s romantic life during these years, other than her decision to break up with a boyfriend when she learned that his father was a coal mine owner. (“I felt they were murderers. He didn’t like me much either.”)56 Another boyfriend may have been the model for the devoted…

In Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth wrote that she was reminded of her father by the “handsome” workmen who came to the house she owned in Maine, with their “sunburned faces . . . their strong fingers yellowed by nicotine”—men who awakened “a flirtatiousness” on her part. What, she wondered, “would it b…

Reviewers of Sleepless Nights were tempted to see the woman depicted as the mother of the narrator as the author’s mother. It is likely that “her weight on a stepladder washing windows, her roast and potatoes and fat yeast rolls” and the “peculiar, helpless assertiveness” that reflected “her profou…