Working GirlBetween lunch and dinner at the restaurant, I wrote. The words flowed. With four or five short stories, I sent them to magazines. No nibbles let alone bites. My third batch, though, got a nibble. A letter from the Holy Grail: The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker. A fiction editor called Shirley Davids said I “had promise.” On my next day-off, I sat in her office on West 43rd Street. She, dangling and occasionally puffing on a cigarette (again, different era), went through—”ripped through” in time and manner—my stories. Six months later my first short-story appeared in The New Yorker.
With the New Yorker seal-of-approval, my stories were no longer rejected summarily and eventually I had enough out to publish a collection with Random House. It did not sell many copies, but with t
