And then, at the tail end of 1973, when she’d just turned thirty-two, Ellen initiated a breakup with Steve. He remembers it not as one defining incident—although their fights were at times acutely painful—but as a result of her amorphous desire for freedom and solitude. It wasn’t a clean break. She and Steve felt like family to each other, and for years they would occasionally sleep together after a night out on the town. But partnership never felt quite right. As she said to Steve, miffed after discovering he’d gone on a few dates with another woman: “You know, we were always better friends than we were lovers.” Looking back, Steve thinks she was probably right. “Ellen really did want to live on her own,” he reflected years later on the phone to me. “She wanted to have other relationships. She wanted to be by herself.”

And she would live alone, for six years after that, first in the place they once shared in Park Slope, then in a small apartment on Waverly Place in the West Village. Nostalgists might picture a modest but sunny studio, perhaps with dusty parquet floors and other prewar details. I certainly did as a young teen growing up with two professor parents in the nineties. By the time my mom got tenure at NYU and we moved into a university-owned apartment in 1995, Bleecker Street’s musicians and artists had long ago been replaced by drunk tourists and college freshmen brandishing fake IDs.

Sadly, old photos confirm that my mom’s place on Waverly did not fit my bohemian fantasy. It was shabby, without the chic. The floors were black-and-white-checkered linoleum, even in the bedroom; my mother’s thousands of records were held up by plywood and cinder blocks; her bed was a frameless mattress and box spring covered with tattered floral sheets. Still, this apartment was hers. It became the place she’d hole up and write (or have writer’s block) for days, eating marshmallow circus peanuts and blintzes from the Polish diner. It became a place she danced to Creedence Clearwater Revival, had affairs, gossiped with friends, and read books while chain-drinking coffee.