Groth, an Edmund Wilson scholar in her own right, said that she and her late collaborator, David Castronovo, had exhausted their academic subject and were both ready to move on to other things. She tells Show Daily, “I had been thinking about using materials that were in my long-stashed-away journals and diaries, and I thought, ‘Well, everyone who could be hurt by this is dead now, so I’ll do it.’ ”
The author actually had hopes of coming to New York and being a writer, and wanted to be published in the New Yorker. “They probably had no idea that I harbored these dreams,” she says. “But in the early days, the job had all of the glamour and thrill for me of someone who had leafed through New Yorker magazines. Being unable to afford a subscription, I’d gone to the campus drugstore to look at every new issue and imagined that I was going to be there along with the Cheevers and the Salingers. It was thrilling.”
Groth answered phones and took messages for some of the writers and cartoonists. Because she got to know everyone, she was able to put together an in-house jazz band. “Lee Lorenz, one of the cartoonists, was a trumpeter; another cartoonist played cornet. A Talk of the Town writer played piano. There was a great moment in the early ’60s when another woman and I tossed what we called a ‘bash’ for everybody at a loft in the Village, at which the New Yorker band played. People like Charles Addams and Muriel Spark—everybody that we could think of—came.” Laughing, she adds, “We provided the beer and the pretzels, and Mrs. Spark provided the Dom Perignon.”
Asked what she hopes readers will take from her memoir, Groth says, “I really do think that men and women alike will feel either recognition or enlightenment when they see how it was for a person of my age, who was living her young adult life in the late 20th century, in the scene of a storied magazine. I feel that sense of being a witness of my times.”
