The last line of the ( partial) article taken off of Yahoo is incredibly sad. "Her women yearn to connect with men or family to find love, but typically find it unattainable."

Judith Rossner was a feminist. Feminism has allowed men to become even more irresponsible while putting so many women into the lifestyle of "Looking for Mr. Goodbar." What radical feminism promised was - you don't need a man. However the modern, independent, employed woman still spends so much energy looking for a man -- and the pool of mature, semi-healthy, gainfully employed males who's psychological baggage does not include a stint in the slammer and or permanent membership in their local Al-Anon or Narc-Anon is very small. So the women keep looking, keep hoping they can find the right guy; in a bar holding a beer in his right hand, a cigarette in his left and telling ribald stories while oogling the waitresses AND being "temporarily unemployed."

Yeah, that'll work. JB


NEW YORK - Judith Rossner, the straight-talking, straight-writing New Yorker who in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" and other novels relentlessly analyzed educated women amid the fear and freedom of social and sexual revolutions, has died at age 70.


Rossner died Tuesday night at NYU Medical Center, her family said Wednesday. She had been ill with diabetes and leukemia, but the cause of death was not immediately determined, said her brother-in-law, Rayner Pike, a retired Associated Press writer.

"Mr. Goodbar," which came out in 1975, was likely her best known work, thanks to the 1977 movie that starred
Diane Keaton as the Roman Catholic schoolteacher in New York City who frequents singles bars, with fatal results.

"The sureness of Judith Rossner's writing and her almost flawless sense of timing create a complex and chilling portrait of a woman's descent into hell that gives this book considerable literary merit," The New York Times wrote.

Rossner's many novels also include "To the Precipice," in which a woman leaves her husband after she becomes pregnant from an extramarital affair, and "His Little Women," a modern, feminist retelling of "Little Women." The No. 1 best seller "August," published in 1983, tells of a young woman and her Manhattan psychoanalyst, whose own travails include dealing with two husbands, a lover and a society that views women over 40 as over the hill.

In a 1983 interview with The Washington Post, Rossner said, "It's astonishing what some women will put up with just to have a warm body some of the brightest women I know are just obsessed with that search. It's very sad."

It was a subject she explored repeatedly.

"My abiding theme is separations," Rossner, married three times, said in the same interview. Her women yearn to connect with men or family to find love, but typically find it unattainable.