What else was I doing with my life? Not enough. There were more readings; there were movie screenings (the best: Sergei Eisenstein’s restored Alexander Nevsky, with a new recording of the Prokofiev score; the prescreening party, with its mounds of caviar and fountains of vodka, has now in memory expanded to the status of legend). Occasionally, fashion department people would give me their tickets to the shows. I had no professional reason whatsoever for attending a fashion show, but I did enjoy them (though I was too high-toned to have admitted that to anyone). Fashion shows always started late, so I’d bring along Pale Fire as my go-to reading material. (Yeah, I was just that way: the young lady who brings a Nabokov novel—and that Nabokov novel—to a fashion show.)

There were press luncheons. There were drinks dates, there were dinners, there were parties. And then there was the subset of the party, the dread book party. My tales of the peculiar torment of the book party are many, and in my growing view they now had to be avoided at all costs: invite me on a walk, to dinner, to a play—I’ll see anything (I’m just a Broadway baby)—or to plant some flowers, but do not ever, ever, ever invite me to a book party (unless you are my actual friend, in which case you must). I can’t bear them. The using of people as props. The instrumental nature of most literary relationships: What can you do for me? The fact that Charlie Rose was often to be found skeeving around at the more prestigious of them. Weren’t these things supposed to have been fun, way back when? And none of them ever had the energy of the Infinite Jest party, I’ll tell you that much.