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Certainly she was free, for the time being, of her family and, if not cured of, distracted from her broken heart. But even so, daily life was laced with anxiety. While she continued to attract admirers among the expat bureaucrats, she was not interested in romance. She wrote that she pursued, that …

Inevitably, but not until the summer of 1956, Wicky learned of the affair. Tex phoned Shirley midweek and then went to Wicky in the Catskills, not returning until the following Sunday. The separation of the adulterous lovers Nettie and Clem in “A Place in the Country” echoes Shirley’s diary entry, …

Increasingly, she came into the life of Tex’s family, joining them for dinner, outings to the theatre or concerts, and on weekend visits to their country house in the Catskills, much as she had with the Daniels. Ann, then in her early teens, remembered Shirley as a rather prim young woman from the …

When Shirley was detailed to work with him through the early summer of 1953, at the end of the emotionally taxing year of her liaison with Howard, she was ready to fall in love again. Tex, as he would later disclose to her, had had affairs before, approaching them as something extraneous to his fam…

Her work at the TAA was low-level and routine: recording minutes of meetings, typing, filing, all of it less than stimulating. She seems to have approached it with some disdain, and her efforts were rewarded with similar lack of approval and little advancement. For intellectual enrichment she turne…