Reviews for Here but Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New Yorker

The average rating for Here but Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New Yorker based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-14 00:00:00 Adde Hulta Lillian Ross wants us to believe that her decades-long affair with her boss at the New Yorker, William Shawn, was a great love story and a true marriage in fact if not in law. But the tone she strikes is so false, so self-glorifying, so emotionally obtuse, that I was left wondering how much of her story was true and how much is self-consoling fantasy. She insists that her affair with Shawn gave her no career advantage, that they never, ever quarreled, that the sex was always terrific, that Shawn's wife and children were perfectly reconciled to the senior Shawn's pseudo-bigamous arrangement, and dozens of similar claims that leave the reader saying, again and again, "Really, Lillian? Really?" Because Ross's memoir sticks so resolutely to its happy-talk line of argument, it's pretty thin and not very interesting, not even the New Yorker anecdotes. But Ross herself comes across as quite a monster--a great character for some other writer to really do something with.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-02 00:00:00 Regina Welcome Gardner Botsford: "Lillian Ross had been busy in the ranks, but she was more or less a joke - her and Shawn's assumption that nobody noticed that they were an item was a comic staple in the office. Then I read Here but Not Here, Ross's self-aggrandizing effort to establish herself as the real Mrs. Shawn and as privy council to Shawn in running the magazine, and I realized she was no joke. I now knew not only the who but the why."