"He was so arrestingly good-looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who couldn’t be contained within the walls of a New York apartment." (opens in new tab)

"No one else looks like that, I thought. I was twenty-one. On a shelf at the literary agency where I was working as a secretary, I’d recently found a copy of Jack’s first novel, 'The Town and the City.' I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me, that I could have been one of the characters trying out some new, free way to live after leaving home."Writes Joyce Johnson, in (The New Yorker).I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading...