Judith Rossner Biography

American novelist, born in New York, educated at City College, New York. Her first novel, To the Precipice (1966), is the story of a Jewish woman's marriage to a gentile, and her slow progress towards maturity. Her first major success was Looking for Mr Goodbar (1975), the harrowing account of a Catholic woman's relentless search for pleasure and release in random sexual encounters, a journey which ultimately results in her death. Attachments (1975) deals with two women married to Siamese twins. Rossner handled similarly sensational material with restraint, clarity, and candour, in much of her work. Emmeline (1980) retells a true story from the nineteenth century; here the eponymous heroine inadvertently marries her son. August (1983) tells of the relationship between an analyst and her patient; His Little Women (1990), with its allusion to the innocent Alcott children's classic, is a family psychodrama set in the rapacious world of Hollywood.