Quick Reads: “The Receptionist” by Janet Groth

Membership

Dear reader,

We're going big with a new Mother Jones Corruption Project, because we realized so many of today's stories come down to corruption: a system that is consistently manipulated by those with wealth and power. We aim to hire, build a team, and do time-intensive reporting to understand how we got here and how we might get out, publishing a major series of investigations in the summer of 2020. If you like how that sounds, please read the plan and join us with a tax-deductible donation so we can go all in.

Monika Bauerlein, CEO

"Corruption Isn’t Just Another Scandal. It’s the Rot Beneath All of Them": That's where we explain why Mother Jones is going big with a new Corruption Project. We aim to hire, build a team, and do time-intensive reporting to understand corruption as a pattern, not just isolated incidents. If you like how that sounds, help us go all in with a tax-deductible donation today.

The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker

By Janet Groth

ALGONQUIN BOOKS

In 1957, New Yorker staffer E.B. White hired 19-year-old Janet Groth, a doe-eyed Midwesterner, as the magazine’s receptionist. For 21 years, Groth was gatekeeper to the literati hub, rubbing elbows with J.D. Salinger, Calvin Trillin, and Jamaica Kincaid while dreaming of publishing her own stuff. In the Mad Men-esque meantime, she marshaled staffers’ wives and their philandering husbands, minded kids and empty houses, and sorted rejected cartoons. For all its intrigue, her graceful memoir aptly portrays the lot of the aspiring writer: self-loathing, loneliness, and a desperate desire to inhabit the literary world.

This review originally appeared in our July/August issue of Mother Jones.