My Life and Thoughts

This September, I was honored to receive a writing award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. I had never previously heard of Rona Jaffe (1931–2005) and was interested to learn that, unlike many philanthropists, she was a bestselling novelist. In the 1960s–70s, Jaffe’s popularity extended all the way to Ankara, where her readers included my own mother. My mother particularly remembered The Best of Everything, a novel about four single girls in New York, for its “humane” treatment of one of the girls going through her ex-boyfriend’s garbage: “not as if she’s a huge loser, but as if something very unfortunate happened to her.”

On reading The Best of Everything, I discovered that the abovementioned girl actually develops a single-minded obsession with this garbage, to the extent that she sits on the back stairs of his apartment every night, waiting for his maid to take out the trash and then scavenging it for traditional garbage-type items. From these items, she deduces the complexion, hair color, menstrual cycle, and name of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. (more…)