Meanwhile, Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse has announced her plans to write television criticism, but we suspect her editing duties will be keeping her plenty busy for the time being.

The scenario: Mr. Showalter couldn’t fall asleep one night thanks to some noisy construction outside his Flatbush Avenue apartment, so his girlfriend suggested he take one of these pills she happened to have lying around.

“It’s a chill-out pill,” she told him, reassuringly. “It’s nothing.”

Mr. Showalter swallowed the drug. Moments later, he nearly passed out in the middle of relieving himself. He woke up the next morning dazed and feeling as if “someone has stuffed a bath towel inside my brain,” he said.

“What the fuck did you give me last night?” he asked his girlfriend.

“Oh, yeah, it’s this thing called Seroquel. It’s just, whatever,” she replied nonchalantly, prompting Mr. Showalter to Google it.

He recalled his findings to the amused audience.

“Seroquel is a drug that they give to schizophrenics who are freaking out,” he said. “It’s for naked white men who are running around thinking they are Jesus. Not mildly annoying Brooklynites who need to catch a little shut-eye!”

Or isn’t it?

Antipsychotic medications—more specifically, a newer generation of such drugs known as “atypical antipsychotics”—are creeping their way into the zeitgeist in the form of “add-on” treatments for depression. Call them antidepressant boosters, if you will.

“It’s a practice that is becoming more common and is generating a fair amount of interest,” said Dr. Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center.

Doctors have long prescribed antipsychotics as augmentation treatments for the seriously depressed. But for the first time, one of them is being marketed in prime time.

IT BEGAN LAST October, when commercials shilling a drug called Abilify started popping up. Approved by the F.D.A. in 2002, Abilify was originally developed to treat schizophrenia and manic episodes. (Not that you could discern as much from the ads.) But in November of 2007, the F.D.A. gave its makers, Bristol-Myers Squibb, approval to market the drug for an expanded use (for “when your antidepressant alone isn’t enough,” the company would go on to coo), making it the first antipsychotic medication with such latitude.

And in April, an F.D.A. advisory committee recommended that the agency grant the same permission to AstraZeneca for the marketing of Seroquel XR, a sustained-release version of Seroquel, which, as Mr. Showalter discovered, is used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. (Neither AstraZeneca nor the F.D.A. would comment on when Seroquel XR might be cleared for marketing as an antidepressant add-on.)

Meanwhile, the prescription rates of these two drugs, and of antipsychotics in general, are on the rise. According to data provided by the pharmaceutical intelligence firm IMS Health, Abilify prescriptions dispensed in the U.S. shot up from 2.8 million in 2004 to 6.7 million in 2008; Seroquel prescriptions from 10.5 million to 16.3 million; and overall antipsychotic prescriptions from 43.8 million to 52.7 million. At the same time, several recent studies, one published by Dr. Olfson in the August 2009 issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry, have found that antidepressants are now the most commonly prescribed class of medications in the U.S. 

“Patients will come in and say, ‘Do I need that medication that has the commercial that says, “If your antidepressant isn’t working, ask your doctor about this?”’” said Dr. Amanda Itzkoff, a psychiatrist on the Upper East Side, who described her core group of patients as “career” women and men between the ages of 18 and 40. “It took a little while for those commercials to really infiltrate, but it’s been picking up in the past four months or so.”

One such commercial begins with a pale middle-aged woman, bathed in hues of gray, walking through a grassy yard and pulling closed her cardigan as she muses, “I’m taking an antidepressant, but I think I might need more help.”

A moment later, after being told that “approximately two out of three people being treated for depression still have depression symptoms,” we see a husky fellow agonizing over some paperwork: “I’m on an antidepressant, but I’m still not where I want to be with my symptoms.”

Next comes the sell: Talk to your doctor about adding Abilify! And then, as the suddenly cheery woman traipses around a colorful party, we hear about the potential risks and side effects. Like dizziness upon standing; increases in white blood cells; seizures; impaired judgment or motor skills; trouble swallowing; high blood sugar, extreme in some cases, which could lead to death; high fever, stiff muscles and confusion that may be signs of a life-threatening reaction; and—here’s the kicker—uncontrollable muscle movements that could become permanent. Yes, it’s possible you could end up with a perpetual grimace on your face.

Some saw the commercial during a recent episode of Saturday Night Live and thought it was one of the show’s classic marketing spoofs. Wrote one befuddled blogger: “The ad tells me that if I am depressed, taking an antidepressant and am still feeling depressed, well then what I need is a heavy duty antipsychotic tranquilizer to shake me out of my doldrums. What the Fuck!”

“I find the Abilify ads rather astonishing,” said the journalist Daphne Merkin, who wrote a 7,500-word piece about her own depression for The New York Times Magazine back in May.

Ms. Merkin said she first heard about Abilify from fellow New Yorker Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the 1990s depression manifesto Prozac Nation. “I was struck by the name,” she said. “It’s like: ‘You will be a person of greater ability.’ It will make your abilities available!” She added it to her existing antidepressant in July of 2008, a few months before the commercials started airing. It’s been helpful, and she hasn’t had any problems with side effects so far, she said. But she suggested there’s something alarming about the fact that ads for an antipsychotic medication now seem as normal as those for the latest nail polish.

“With Abilify, there seems to have been some kind of turning point in the fact that this type of drug has been blurred into the available smorgasbord of medication,” she said. “Now, it’s actually just right out there with all your other Pristiqs and Prozacs and Zolofts. I mean, it’s not like there’s a commercial for Thorazine. Like, ‘Hi, I’m not feeling well today, let me gulp down some Thorazine and be muted for the next two years!’”

Sonia Choi, a spokeswoman for Bristol-Myers Squibb, said the company believes “that the Abilify consumer advertising campaign is appropriate and provides an important service, informing the approximately two out of three adults diagnosed with major depressive disorder who do not experience adequate relief from antidepressant treatment, that additional help may be available.”

But at least one New Yorker with depression is skeptical.

“I’m not opposed to the idea of adding an antipsychotic if it’s useful, but I do think they are preying on the culture of people who are willing to just take anything to stop feeling bad,” said 27-year-old Randall Lotowycz of Park Slope. (He said he was a little freaked out when one doctor suggested adding an anti-epileptic drug to his Prozac regimen.)

“Everything in our culture is about how to do things easier and more quickly and to add on,” said Mr. Lotowycz. “If you’re willing to just add on and add on, you’re not really addressing what the problem is.”

jpompeo@observer.com

“Everything I’ve ever written comes out of the poetry,” Ms. Jong said, sipping red wine. “The poetry reminds me of where I came from. It keeps me in the world of the unconscious, the world of metaphor, the world of dreams. For me it’s essential.”

Nearby stood Ms. Jong’s co-hosts: the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, dressed in a sweater that from far away looked to be made of gold shavings, and Daphne Merkin, who said she was going home soon to finish a book review for the Daily Beast.

“One of the things that starts happening when you reach your 50s and 60s is a lot of people you love start dying,” Erica Jong said last night during her book party at the New York Yacht Club near Times Square. Dressed in a bright red button-down with black epaulettes and handsomely diamond-studded flannel slippers, she was talking about her new collection of poetry, Love Comes First, and how a lot of the poems in it are about loss.

“Everything I’ve ever written comes out of the poetry,” Ms. Jong said, sipping red wine. “The poetry reminds me of where I came from. It keeps me in the world of the unconscious, the world of metaphor, the world of dreams. For me it’s essential.”

Nearby stood Ms. Jong’s co-hosts: the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, dressed in a sweater that from far away looked to be made of gold shavings, and Daphne Merkin, who said she was going home soon to finish a book review for the Daily Beast.

A large screen mounted off to the side and away from Ms. Jong’s guests showed a video of the author reading from the book in Central Park. Earlier, she had recited a few of the poems aloud.

“We’ve never had a party here before,” she said, looking around the spacious wood-paneled hall. Charming model yachts stood on display in tall glass cases, and a comically large fireplace filled with logs. Her husband, Ms. Jong said, was a member of the club.

“I love to sail and my husband is a mad sailor,” she said. “We keep our boat in Norwalk, Connecticut. I’m his deck monkey!”

She called over her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, an author in her own right who recently took a job as a literary agent with David Vigliano Associates. Both mother and daughter took off their shoes.

A moment later Ms. Jong-Fast was talking about her new career.

“I sort of liberated myself to be a capitalist,” she said. “My whole life I’ve thought, ‘Ohhhh, I have to be an artist!’”

By around 8:30 the crowd had thinned; a few Yacht Club professionals carried out a tray of uneaten dessert cakes the size of softballs. The Daily Transom lingered to ask Ms. Jong's husband about the model yachts.

Late in the afternoon we reached Mr. Levy and Ms. Merkin and got our answers.

First things first: The photo comes from a New Yorker article by Ian Parker published last summer about primatologist Frans de Waal and his work with bonobos. Mr. de Waal took the photo himself, and when Mr. Levy wrote to him asking for permission to use it on the cover of Erotomania, he agreed under the condition that Mr. Levy credit him appropriately, send him a complementary copy of the book, and allow him to write a short informational paragraph about bonobos to be printed with the front matter.

Mr. Levy agreed to these terms.

Around the same time, according to Mr. Levy, Mr. de Waal was contacted by Ms. Squire. She wanted to use the bonobos photo on the cover of her book, too. Not realizing that Ms. Squire was calling about a project unrelated to Mr. Levy's novel, Mr. de Waal gave her the go-ahead.

"He simply got us confused, and he gave permission to us and them at the same time without realizing it," Mr. Levy said.

Mr. de Waal confirmed that story. "I received emails about this cover from both authors or publishers in the same week," he wrote in an email. "I am not a photo agency, but a busy scientist, so [I] don't keep very careful track of this sort of request, of which I get too many. And so yes, in my mind I must have thought I was dealing with a single book, and never realized I gave two permissions."

He added, "I think it's amusing that both decided to use the photo in about the same way, but perhaps this is dictated with the vertical format of a book cover, whereas the photo clearly is a horizontal one."

As for Ms. Merkin's blurbs, well, it's just kind of a coincidence. In an interview yesterday, Ms. Merkin said she and Ms. Squire have been with friends forever, and Mr. Levy she knew from sitting together on panels about psychotherapy. Both asked her to blurb their books separately, and it was she who first brought the cover problem to their attention.

We asked Ms. Merkin to explain how this photo of bonobos doing it could have possibly fit with both of these books, one of which is a raunchy erotic novel and the other is a cultural history of marriage.

"One is about the consequences of unfettered lust, and the threat it would impose to the established order," Ms. Merkin said. "The other is about the pleasures of unfettered lust versus the gratification of individualized desire, or something like that, if that makes any sense."

Still, it is a funny coincidence! An even funnier one is that Daphne Merkin, the New York literary critic and author, blurbed both of these books. Of I Don't she said:

And of Erotomania she said:

We called Ms. Merkin for comment—honestly, what's the deal?!—but haven't yet heard back. Expect an update when we do. Messages have been left for Mr. Levy and the publicity director at Bloomsbury as well.

NOTE: Initially the bonobos in the photo were referred to here as chimpanzees. The error has since been corrected. Wouldn't be the first time we've mislabeled apes. More to come tomorrow.

“I would say my life was ‘before’ and ‘after’ that spanking essay,” the 51-year-old Ms. Merkin said the other day of “Spanking: A Romance,” published in The New Yorker in 1996.

The delicate flowers of literary New York might say the same.

Confessional essays have a comically devastating effect: Readers soak up the sensationalism and immediately distance themselves from the practice (or the act confessed). The apoplexy associated with this type of writing is as curious as the urge to do it. And what of the chronic confessor’s highbrow career after many dispatches from the small, clammy world of “I”?

When Ms. Merkin, a prolific essayist and novelist, wrote “Spanking,” she’d already established her credentials as someone who wrote about books and other such important things. This time, Ms. Merkin’s deeply psychological essay told of her wealthy but withholding German-Jewish Orthodox family and chilly Victorian-Manhattan childhood, as well as her lifelong daydream of finding herself “thrust over a man’s knee, being soundly spanked for some concocted misdeed.” The fulfillment of this wildly subversive desire, she wrote, had resulted in marriage and, later, in parenthood.

But literary New York was shocked anyway. Outraged! Women felt betrayed; men mystified. She was a mother, after all. And this was their New Yorker. (Meanwhile, Ms. Merkin got propositioned by newly converted New Yorker subscribers across the country.) And thus the memoir-triumphant 90’s continued to spawn even more mini-Merkins: cerebral writers who revealed their un–Upper East sides, only to be lovingly embraced by grateful editors of varying esteem. It was on this safe, literary stage that writers could expose some secret patch of themselves, thinking that this time they’d really break through the confessional bottom.

Well, hold on a minute, Toni Bentley. Because, first, there was Ms. Merkin.

“Daphne is a pioneer in so many things,” said Ms. Merkin’s longtime friend Chip McGrath, now a writer for The New York Times. “The famous spanking piece in The New Yorker probably inspired a lot of less-than-good imitations.”

“I think it’s helped her more than it ought to have,” Mr. McGrath also said. “She’s too well remembered for that. Women’s magazines are always calling her, and I wonder if that’s why and not because she’s one of the best book critics around—which she is.”

Smart writers of either gender who frequently indulge in their personal lives are received with equal parts fascination and scorn, their impulse to divulge considered either brave or lazy or narcissistic. Even if the disclosure is brilliantly written, the very impulse to broadcast one’s secrets is analyzed by the chattering and healthily repressed as if it’s a psychological disease.

Many editors, however, drool for that sort of thing. It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or go online without learning of someone’s hot sex with her hot husband (Ayelet Waldman, in her clucked-over, nanny-nanny-boo-boo New York Times Modern Love column) or, on the low end, a boyfriend’s bad breath (Elizabeth Hayt in the New York Post column she acquired after unfurling her transparently ballsy memoir, I’m No Saint). The banality of the confession led a self-hating and opportunistic James Frey to dress up a lover’s suicide with drama when the mere fact of it would have sufficed.

But his purging of shame, like so many others, was deemed penetrating. It took people places deep down inside.

As Ms. Merkin herself once asked in The New York Times Book Review about Catherine Millet’s milli-partnered sex memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M.: “Is this really a place worth getting to?”

MS. MERKIN LIVES IN AN UPPER EAST SIDE BUILDING with a perfect lobby and an elevator operator. Her apartment, decorated in purples and oranges and cheerful curtains that recall the Polynesian Resort at Disney World, is almost completely lined with books—even the dining room, where the shelves are labeled by subject, the project of a former assistant. Her current assistant, Sasha, a recent Harvard graduate, answered the phone and ordered sushi, among other things. (When Ms. Merkin forgot a Wordsworth quote, it was Sasha she thought to ask about it.)

She and Ms. Merkin have a casual relationship, occasionally getting short with one another like mother and daughter. But Ms. Merkin, now divorced, has a real one of those: Zoë, who’s 16, goes to private school and doesn’t read her mother’s work. (Her father, Ms. Merkin’s ex-husband, is Michael Brod, a stockbroker; the two were married in 1988 and divorced in 1995.)

“When Zoë was young, we started a nonconformity club,” said Ms. Merkin, dressed in plain black pants and a white button-down shirt and cardigan. She has thick, frizzy-curly black hair and speaks in fragments, one thought dissolving into almost visible ellipses, another sentence consuming the former like a wave. She was happy to point out a bookshelf in her study, one comprised almost entirely of literary erotica. And she asks a lot of questions, on everything from compulsive e-mailing to blog reading to whether one says “African-American” or “black.” Political correctness is one of her “bugaboos.”

“I think when people respond strongly [to confessional pieces], they’re responding because they don’t want to know and it’s a very P.C. culture,” she said. “One of the first pieces that was, for me, a step into this was the one about Hedda Nussbaum. Talk about being attacked!” In that eye-opening piece, for the now-defunct Seven Days, Ms. Merkin suggested that Hedda Nussbaum must have liked something about her abusive, sadomasochistic relationship with Joel Steinberg (who was convicted of killing their child). “People are more comfortable saying, ‘That’s them; this is me.’ What’s the Somerset Maugham quote—‘the normal is the rarest thing’? … And your generation is more conformist.”

The very act of another person writing about her private life, not to mention private parts, is grounds for other people’s self-reflection on self-absorption (“I would never write/talk about that!”). Perhaps because it’s become repetitive; but also because much of it isn’t very good. The pathologically well-read Ms. Merkin—confessional writing has a long literary history—is quick to make distinctions.

“You need a degree of self-awareness,” she said. “Enormous self-acceptance, to my mind, doesn’t make for the most penetrating …. If you happily write this stuff and accept yourself, that kind of way of looking at it is alien to me. Not that I don’t have moments of liking things about myself, but the shadowy is always very clear to me.

“I have very strong feelings about self-revelation,” she continued. “It is an art. Tina Brown once said to me, ‘The art of self-exposure is not simply catharsis.’ When I write personally, I truly try and think: ‘If I were reading about me, would I want to know this much? Have I gone on too much here?’”

Still, some avert their eyes. Ms. Merkin’s fellow writers, for sure, haven’t forgotten the spanking piece.

“Daphne Merkin’s piece about her appetite for being spanked set the stage in 1996,” wrote Elizabeth Benedict in a 2004 American Prospect story about fellow confessors David Denby, the New Yorker film critic (divorce/financial loss/Internet porn); his ex-wife, the writer Cathleen Schine (dogs/ divorce/incipient lesbianism); and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt (jealousy/heartbreak/Web stalking).

And in August 2002, Slate’s Timothy Noah remarked on a correction that The Times published about errors in one of Ms. Merkin’s book reviews. The headline blared triumphantly: “The Times Book Review Puts Daphne Merkin Across Its Knee.”

But those are just the obvious and irresistible adolescent jokes, ultimately harmless. Ms. Merkin, however, did recall one tangible way that the spanking piece messed up her professional life.

“The instinct, if a woman writes about personal stuff, for some male readers, is to either frivolize it or kind of …. It’s something to do with unease,” she said. “I once wrote a piece for the New York Times Arts and Ideas section. I had gone to see [then–executive editor] Howell Raines, and I said I was writing something on the first psychoanalytic conference that’s ever been held on sadism. I wrote this very clinical but feisty thing about the conference … but ‘I’ didn’t enter it. I was going over it with the fact-checker at 7 Friday night—this was for Saturday—and he said, ‘Wait a minute, I just got a call.’ Five minutes later, it was the editor of the section, and she said it was just killed and that it was Howell’s decision.” (Mr. Raines didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

“I wrote Howell an e-mail,” Ms. Merkin continued. “And he wrote me that he was very sorry, but it had been brought to his attention that I had written a piece on spanking for The New Yorker. They were worried. I wrote back that this could only happen to a woman writer. Did anyone say no to Mailer after he knifed his wife?”

But, based on her impressive output, most editors don’t say no to Ms. Merkin (and she said she’s always pitching them ideas). Besides The Times Magazine, Ms. Merkin is a columnist for Elle. She publishes often in other venues on a wide range of subjects. “A lot of magazine editors have figured out she has trouble saying no,” said Mr. McGrath. “On the one hand, she doesn’t go to parties and seek the limelight, and on the other hand, she likes being a player intellectually.”

In fact, Ms. Merkin’s productivity is remarkable at a time when many magazines look like all-male reviews, save for the random communiqué from a woman on blowjobs or work-life balance. One could argue that women are unfairly penalized for baring their souls or, on the other hand, hired solely for such soul-baring. But Ms. Merkin manages to write about W.G. Sebald and Henry Roth, all while disclosing her experience of getting plastic surgery and discoursing on her own bad taste in men.

And she isn’t shy about flashing her intellectual credentials: In a May 2004 article in The Times Magazine about turning 50, “Keeping the Forces of Decrepitude at Bay,” she referenced Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Alice James (sister of William and Henry), Nancy Astor, Oscar Wilde, Zelda Fitzgerald, husband F. Scott and Nabokov—all in an article about being injected with Restylane and Botox.

“It haunted me … ,” Ms. Merkin said of her spanking piece. “I was putting in this reference to Judith Butler in this thing I was writing about gender—I’m always trying, in these Times pieces, to drag in my academic interests. Because it’s one thing to write very good reviews about Virginia Woolf, or to write really interesting pieces …. I think that women that have ascertainable intellect often don’t go so near the subjects of the erotic, the romantic, the personal …. Unlike, say, a Mailer or an Updike—they never had trouble going in and out.”

Once, women who wrote about women and feminine concerns were considered feminists. Now it seems that women writing about women are in danger of bringing down all of womanhood. If the very subject that a woman writes about suggests her level of seriousness—i.e., her feminist chops—sometimes this might not include the subject of self.

“Are you delicately asking me why I write about myself instead of hurricanes?” Ms. Merkin said at one point.

But Ms. Merkin likes writing about herself—as long as the work is sufficiently inquiring, she says. She’s best known for her essay collection Dreaming of Hitler, but when she was 30 she published Enchantment, an autobiographical novel about her relationship with her mother. In it, the protagonist, Hannah, grows up as one of six children in a rich Orthodox Manhattan family (Merkin Concert Hall is named for Ms. Merkin’s late father, Hermann, a private investor and philanthropist).

At that point, Ms. Merkin, a Barnard graduate, had been writing for years—she first wrote for Commentary in her early 20’s. Diana Trilling was her mentor. When she was 21, Woody Allen wrote her a fan letter about her New Republic review of a Jane Bowles book. “He said, ‘You’re wasting your gifts on reviewing,’” Ms. Merkin recalled. The two became lifelong friends.

Later, after a job as an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, came Tina Brown’s The New Yorker and the confessional age. Ms. Merkin had a film column and wrote many other pieces, including a stark essay about her various stays at mental hospitals. When David Remnick took over as editor in 1998, Ms. Merkin continued as a staff writer, then went on freelance contract, and eventually stopped writing for the magazine.

“The culture has become very journalistic, as opposed to one that was belletristic,” she said. “Who would publish a Virginia Woolf today? I don’t think inquiry into something is going to go somewhere. There isn’t the daring for it.”

Ms. Merkin, however, seems to have found a cozy home at The Times Magazine; in the last few years, she’s written about author Alice Munro, the “literary Freud” Adam Phillips, the attractiveness of Samuel Alito and the allure of Camilla and Charles. Her last Elle column, on the heels of a profile of Madonna, was entitled “The Oldest Confession.” She wrote: “Reading about other people’s lives is a way out of the imprisonment of being immutably ourselves.”

“I sit in therapy to this day and say, ‘I get nothing—I don’t get enough out of [writing],’” she said. “Years ago, a therapist said to me, ‘What do you want out of it?’ And I said, ‘Love.’ What man would say, ‘What I want out of this is love’? They’d say, ‘Admiration.’ You can get admiration, which for many men is often the same.”

Ms. Merkin is working on a novel about romantic obsession, something she started years ago. “Now that I seem to be past all romantic addiction, I’m writing from that important tranquillity,” she said. “What was that Wordsworthian thing—‘emotions suspended in tranquillity’? Something like that.”

New Yorker, Daphne Merkin describes her multiple stays on the psychiatric

wards of several institutions. She tells us of her desire to die, her fierce

and unremitting attraction to death, describing the boredom, the flatness, the

grayness of her hospitalized days. The piece is written with exquisite control,

perfectly chosen details, a bare whisper of the acute, lobe-penetrating pain

hissing beneath. She writes coolly about the furies that have attacked her

periodically since she was 8 years old. She has stared at them-is staring at

them still-and knows that staring doesn't scare them away. She knows she may

not emerge from the darker cycles ahead.t

This is not a piece filled with confessional details. It is

far more of a hardened journalist's report from the battlefield than a gory,

four-hour war movie. But it has a shocking effect. Because despite our

enlightened pose, mental illness frightens us in a special way, still carries

an aura of shame and failure that renders it different from artery leaks or

brain tumors-even in the age of Oprah. We fight to keep our medical records

private. We fight to keep our darkest dreams private. Each morning we make

ourselves up to present our prettiest, cleanest selves to the world, our

tremors hidden, our dental records filed away, our closeness to death our own business,

not for publication.

As a result, stories by Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, A.

Alvarez, William Styron and Kay Redfield Jamison seem to vibrate with

transgression: The curtain has been pulled back, and we are allowed to visit

places where we do not belong. It is this transgression that makes for such

good reading, grabs our attention and emboldens our not entirely nice,

rubbernecking curiosity-pulling us in, moths to the flame that is consuming

someone else.

It is the writer's prerogative to rummage in exactly those

attics that have been marked "off limits." It is the writer's responsibility to

go right to the edge of human experience and explore the very place where the

dragons are licking their chops. Since the age of Columbus ended, the mind has

been the writer's richest terrain, and one's own mind is without doubt the

fertile crescent of the writer's project. But Daphne Merkin has done a brave

and wondrous thing (even if it is in the job description): She has made clear

that what we can offer now-even to the best, the richest and the most educated

of the dangerously depressed-is not much more than a cupping of the soul, a

bleeding that leaves the patient to fight another day.

Think if Daphne Merkin had been poor, how quickly she might

have joined the homeless. Think if years of therapy hadn't steadied her shaky

step, how many more times she would have fallen and how much shorter and less

fruitful this brilliantly productive life would have been. Think if there

weren't family to take in her young daughter, to accompany Ms. Merkin to and

from the hospital. Think if there had been no great talent, just raw, boring,

incapacitating illness-what would have happened?

Money and mental illness, insurance and deep pockets should

have nothing to do with one another. But they do, oh they do, and that fact is

just one more nail in the coffin of our democratic responsibility to the

weakest among us . We are very far

from living in a just society. While mental illness blasts apart life on Park

Avenue as equally as it does in Bed-Stuy, the chances of surviving to write

about it are not equal. That is our shame. In the old days of lengthy stays at

expensive places like McLean and Austen Riggs, the patients at least received

the focused tenderness of a staff that knew them, that was trying as hard as

possible. But now the H.M.O.'s have spoken, and the patients are hustled

through. Medicine doses are adjusted, but no one has the time, the months it

takes to know anyone. The expensive way probably didn't cure large numbers, but

it might have better preserved the civilities of care, the amenities of a

helping hand and a listening ear. Now we are on a shuttle that stops for no

one.

I am not dewy-eyed about

the holiness of writers. The story I am discussing would never have appeared on

Ms. Merkin's computer screen had the writer not possessed a more than

considerable need for attention. Some writers have an exhibitionism that the

Puritans would despise, that would make any psychoanalyst a little nervous. But

it is nevertheless a prerequisite

for some kinds of writing. Writers of a certain sort do tend toward an almost

perverse form of lifting the window shade at all the wrong moments. I admit to

being a part of that sisterhood myself. From time to time, wrapped in my holy

writer's mission, I may have seriously harmed myself or others. Writers are

prodded toward what they say out of complicated, self-serving need. But the

public, those who watch when the shade is up-they, too, have odd motives. In

the end, writing well is still the best defense against the monsters within,

the good citizens without. Writing well is not only a revenge against those who

have rendered one powerless, but also a beribboned gift, an offering to the

rest of us, a way of expanding our ability to use the whole ball of wax rather

than just our little God-given piece.

The truth that Ms. Merkin brings us is that psychiatric

institutions are holding pens, vastly expensive timeouts, not particularly

humane or caring places. They are mostly helpless before the roaring of the

illness they contain, but necessary because there is nothing else, because

there is no cure. Nevertheless, these hospitals provide the only hope, even if

this hope is not first-rate, not genuine. As Daphne Merkin describes it, as we

have heard it from others, these hospitals do not grant renewal; rather they

provide-with the best of intentions-a dreary half-time show.

I wonder why it is that we can see the protein combos of the

tiniest microbes and all the moons that circle Mars, but we cannot assure that

every little girl will hopscotch right into a calm and rewarding adulthood-one

that banishes the nightmares, defeats the dark voices within. Reading Ms.

Merkin's story, I thought of the hundreds of thousands of minds pulled down

toward death, of the voices sending out a siren song of hopelessness across the

land, a deathly loon call echoing lake to lake.

Daphne Merkin bravely gives words to the silent scream and

deserves not our pity, not our voyeurism, but-better than our sympathy-our envy

and admiration of her sharp eye and sharper tongue. We need her to stay with us

for a very long time.

National TV Turn-Off Week got off to a promising start, but only because I thought it started on Sunday night. So when my daughter informed me it didn't begin until Monday morning, I seized the opportunity and watched back-to-back Clint Eastwood movies on TNT.

We're not one of those families where our kids call the shots. We've been through Turn-Off Week before. In previous years, I told my daughter that if she didn't want to watch TV that was fine with me, but I was watching whatever and whenever I damn well pleased. What made this year different, besides our desire to support our child's positive–if slightly bizarre and inexplicable–behavior, was that I'd stopped feeling good about watching the same talking heads on Geraldo night after night. I've got nothing against Marcia Clark, Gerry Spence, Ann Coulter, Jeanine Pirro and the rest of the crew. They're all bright, telegenic people who had the O.J. Simpson case down cold. But when they started pontificating about the Clinton Presidency and then the war in Kosovo, I came to the conclusion that they couldn't all be experts on everything. Their guess wasn't any better than mine. In short, I was just wasting my time.

Monday didn't present a major problem. I went to the Whitney Estate auction cocktail party at Sotheby's–not to bid on anything, but so I wouldn't be tempted to turn on the tube. That night, when I got home, I read Daphne Merkin's story in The New Yorker about growing up rich in Manhattan. While I don't believe for a minute that she doesn't know how much money she has in her trust fund, the piece was relatively long and it got me to 11 P.M., when I dozed off.

I woke up the following morning feeling, if not completely refreshed, then slightly more at peace with the world than I do going to bed after watching the scalded baby stories on the Fox 10 O'Clock News . However, it was becoming apparent to me that TV is an addiction, hardly less insidious than cigarettes or heroin. At some point during the day, I even asked myself the following question: If you had to give up liquor, TV or baked goods, which one couldn't you live without? The answer was baked goods–but that didn't make National TV Turn-Off Week any easier.

Television and I go way back. When I was a child, Friday was the happiest day of the week. That's when TV Guide arrived and I planned my weekend. Once I finished my homework, nothing lay before me but a virtually uninterrupted vista of TV-watching all the way through Sunday night.

Saturday morning, I'd wake up around 6 A.M., get myself a bowl of Rice Krispies (substituting Coca-Cola for milk), and go hang out with my baby sitter, who slept through Modern Farmer , Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Jetsons , all the way to Sky King . She eventually got up around 11 and forced me to go to the park under the threat of a beating. By then, My Friend Flicka was on, which I didn't much care for, anyway.

Saturday night was Chiller Theater , when I got to stay up until at least 10. My baby sitter would pop out her false teeth once or twice during the movie to scare the living bejesus out of me. Sunday always had a pall cast over it because I knew that I wouldn't be able to watch TV again until the following Friday.

My parents were adamant about no TV on weeknights. When the Batman TV series premiered–an event among children of my era no less momentous than the final episodes of M.A.S.H. and Seinfeld and the Barbara Walters-Monica Lewinsky interview all rolled into one–my parents refused to let me watch. They wouldn't believe me when I told them that my teacher had assigned it as homework. To this day, I haven't forgiven them and sometimes wonder if it's where my anger comes from.

But I digress. Tuesday night, we went to see Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told . It was funnier than both the Sotheby's cocktail party and Daphne Merkin's story combined. But when we got home, my wife wanted to watch TV. Actually, she claims it was me. In any case, we heroically and successfully resisted the temptation.

But when I woke up Wednesday morning, it was to the sound of raised voices. Our daughter had apparently gotten up earlier than normal, strolled into the kitchen and surprised her mother, who was watching the Today show. "I wanted to see about the accident," my wife explained. She was referring to the Colorado high school shootings. I'd vaguely heard something about it the day before. But since the TV was turned off, it was difficult to gauge the magnitude of the tragedy.

"The whole nation is grieving," she informed me. "It's enormous."

"You should have been on AOL," our daughter stated knowledgeably. "There's pictures there about the shooting."

"You were watching AOL?" my wife asked. "It's just a technicality."

"Mom, I didn't go into it. I was doing research on frogs."

That morning, my wife attended a school breakfast at somebody's apartment. Turns out we were the only family in the class observing National TV Turn-Off Week. "I went in there and said I'd been found out this morning," she reported. "I was feeling so guilty I wanted to confess, and no one seemed to know what I was talking about."

When my daughter got home from school that afternoon, I confronted her. I wanted to know why we were being punished while all the other parents got to watch TV. "Most people don't tell their parents," she explained. "Last year, I didn't tell you until the second week."

Needless to say, by Wednesday night we were watching wall-to-wall coverage of the school massacre on seven or eight channels. TV Turn-Off Week was over. It had lasted approximately 48 hours.

But it was therapeutic. While we hadn't used the time to learn to organize a community clean-up, learn about a different culture by organizing an international dinner party or, my personal favorite, start a public policy book group, as the materials my daughter brought home from school helpfully suggested, I now feel cheap every time I turn on Geraldo, and even Hardball . The TV's usually off by 10. And, the last few nights, I've fallen asleep while reading a book.

Not that I've gone cold turkey. In fact, I've just discovered Antiques Roadshow on PBS. It stars well-groomed experts from Sotheby's and Christie's boldly going into the heartland and appraising the locals' ceramic jugs and Navajo rugs. It doesn't sound like much, I know, but it's actually educational. As a matter of fact, I'd like us to start watching it as a family.

In a front-page piece on what The New York Times first dubbed "the chopped liver war," Forward food maven Matthew Goodman made the point that "New Yorkers are as proprietary about their chopped liver as Parisians are about their croissants. A New Yorker who really knows the best chopped liver in the city possesses the unshakable self-confidence of one who has, say, finally solved the longtime problem of who among Mantle, Mays and Snider was the best centerfielder."

In other words, this is a war not just over chopped chicken liver, but over taste discernment, sensual attunement and judgment, mysteries deeper than mere schmaltz.

And just who would that person be, that "New Yorker who really knows the best chopped liver in the city," who's unlocked a mystery akin to the riddle of the sphinx, or the question of what God was doing before the Creation? To determine the answer, Mr. Goodman arranged a carefully objective blind tasting of chopped liver from Barney Greengrass, from the five places Gael Greene claimed had better chopped liver (Katz's Deli, the Second Avenue Deli, the Stage Deli, Zabar's and the Carnegie Deli) as well as chopped liver from Fischer Brothers & Leslie, the kosher butcher Daphne Merkin promoted in a recent Talk of the Town piece, and an entry from Murray's Sturgeon Shop, a rival smoked fish emporium to Barney Greengrass.

Do I need to tell you who won? Let me quote the Forward Food Maven's blind taste test judgment upon Barney Greengrass in full:

"A blind taste test confirms it: This is the best chopped liver in the city. The key to this chopped liver's success is balance: The consistency is rough-chopped and the texture faintly oily, yet it retains an admirable lightness; the taste is strong and well defined, yet also surprisingly sweet, without leaving much of an aftertaste. But what put this one over the top was the remarkably large, high-quality chunks of liver throughout. Only the too-many pieces of egg keeps this from being the perfect chopped liver."

Jeez, enough with the egg already. Get over it. My other slight quarrel with the Forward Food Maven is that he doesn't seem to get the tone-tongue-in-cheek hyperbole-of my remark that Barney Greengrass chopped liver is "a supreme achievement of Jewish American civilization." But that faint objection scarcely mars an appraisal which completely vindicates my judgment and leaves the other choices in the dust. I think we can safely say the chopped liver war is over, the victory is total. Only Katz's Deli, of the other seven contenders for the throne, is given any real praise. And listen to the descriptions of some of Gael Greene's favorites from the Forward Food Maven's blind tasting: "disconcertingly rubbery" (the Second Avenue Deli); "the first bite tastes frankly more like egg salad than chopped liver" (Stage Deli); "the taste is very livery, but that's the main problem: The heavy liverishness is not adequately balanced … it's like eating a piece of liver on a plate" (Zabar's); "by far the worst chopped liver of the bunch, it was also by far the most expensive. This is chopped liver for tourists, or for anyone else who doesn't know from chopped liver. Feh" (Carnegie Deli).

In other words, chopped liver for Gael Greene, four out of five of whose choices were greeted with one eloquent variation of "Feh" after another in the blind taste test.

And finally we come to Fischer Brothers & Leslie, the chopped liver celebrated by Daphne Merkin in a Talk of the Town piece: "The problem, quite simply, is the taste" said the Forward 's Food Maven of Ms. Merkin's choice. You could say, with apologies to Ms. Merkin (author of an essay about the erotic appeal of spanking), the Forward gave her chopped liver choice a good spanking: "It's way too salty, which makes the liver sour and leaves a strong aftertaste."

Fascinating! That description of Ms. Merkin's favored chopped liver could easily apply to her little Talk of the Town disquisition on the chopped liver wars: sour and leaves an aftertaste.

The Forward shrewdly busted Ms. Merkin on her condescension to the chopped liver contention, her assertion that the whole fuss over chopped liver was a bit beneath her, a bit too distastefully "borscht belt" for a serious littérateur like herself. It was, she said, "an acute case of ethnic nostalgia": one not suffered by "observant Jews"-or (as The Forward put it), "one can't help but feel she means 'genuine' Jews." Exactly. She goes on to read the minds, explain the motives of the partisans in the chopped liver wars with the insulting aperçu that "It seems that the further you've moved from your origins, the more you look back in hunger."

In other words, for someone like her whose relation to her Jewishness is oh-so-much-more genuine this fuss over chopped liver reflects the deracination of Jews less authentic than her, seeking a simulacrum of that which she already possesses.

But since she feels she's psychic enough to read the minds and motives of other writers she hasn't met, to insult them in this fashion, let's look a little more closely at her motivations, what we know of them, and see whether there might be some agenda she didn't disclose to her readers (and I suspect her editors) which might explain her sneer-what some might call the sour grapes beneath her sour liver. Just speculating, of course, the way she speculates in her piece, but with a little bit more inside information.

It's really a story about a New York literary friendship that might have been but never was. In a way, it reminds me of Isaac Bashevis Singer's comic tales of rival scribes in the Warsaw writers club in the prewar period before Hitler destroyed the golden tradition of Yiddish writing. And Hitler, alas, may play a role here, too.

Both Ms. Merkin and I had books with Hitler in the title published last year. The title essay of her book, "Dreaming of Hitler: A Memoir of Self-Hatred," begins with an account of her recurring dreams as an adolescent of romantic encounters with Hitler. With a Harlequin romance-type Hitler: "His eyes were a piercing light-blue with tiny pupils, and he sported a perky, abridged mustache" (excellent adjective choice: "perky"). In Ms. Merkin's romantic dream encounters, after "a lot of gentle argument, of the sort two lovers might engage in," after Hitler strokes her hair affectionately, Ms. Merkin succeeds in convincing Hitler that he really shouldn't hate the Jews, or that he hated the Jews for the wrong reason-"and 6 million lives were about to be spared!"

I will forbear making any judgments about her dream, or the essay that follows in which she comes to reconnect with her Jewish roots after she takes time off from attending the Frankfurt Book Fair to make a brief, unsuccessful search for an ancestor's grave in the Jewish cemetery of Frankfurt.

But I would quarrel with what she presents as her explanation for Hitler's hatred of the Jews, since that is my expertise: Hitler explanations and the agendas behind them. She tells us that her explanation had "little to do with what I considered to be the pompous male line of thinking about the world, with theories of a humiliated post-World-War-I Germany or of an entrenched national anti-Semitism." I wonder if she includes in her condemnation of such "pompous" thinking the powerful thesis articulated by the late Lucy S. Dawidowicz in her landmark book The War Against the Jews . I guess Ms. Merkin probably would condemn it, so quaintly is it concerned with an exacting examination of the historical origins of Hitler's anti-Semitism. It seems that Daphne Merkin knows better than Lucy Dawidowicz, with her drearily rigorous historical concerns. Daphne Merkin thinks it's all about Hitler's daddy: "Having been fascinated by Hitler for years, I had read enough about his background to know that the real object of his fury was his father, Alois, who had beaten him with Teutonic conviction," she tells us. (In other words, Hitler's daddy spanked him too hard. Hmmmm … Let's not go there.) In fact, this is the widely discredited theory advanced by Alice Miller in For Your Own Good , her tract against corporal punishment, a theory whose shaky historical foundations, whose naïve and reductive theoretical logic I criticized first in a 1995 New Yorker article and then in my book.

Curiously, in the revised hard-bound version of Dreaming of Hitler , Ms. Merkin appends to her Hitler's-daddy explanation an abrupt parenthetical retreat from that claim: "Although I am not one of those who believe, as the analyst Alice Miller argued, that Hitler's genocidal impulse can be attributed to a single cause, such as child abuse." In fact, that's exactly what she does argue in the previous sentence: " I had read enough to know … that the real object of his fury was his father Alois, who had beaten him …"

A possible explanation for this contradictory insertion: She added this awkward parenthetical retraction after she read my critique of Alice Miller's naïve single-causation theory in The New Yorker in 1995. (The parenthesis does not appear in the original 1989 version of her story, published in Esquire.) By adding the parenthesis, she apparently hoped not to appear naïve historically while still somehow preserving her bad daddy thesis, but it doesn't quite add up.

But let's set aside this confusion and return to the Warsaw writers club-type comedy of literary manners. One evening last year, not long after Ms. Merkin's book Dreaming of Hitler had been published, and not long before my book Explaining Hitler was to be published, I got a call from my sometime phone-friend Jonathan Schwartz, the gifted radio man. Jonathan told me he was having dinner with his friend Daphne Merkin, and he decided he had to call me right there and then to suggest we get together. After all, he said, in so many words, Daphne and I had Hitler in common.

Charming as he is, I think Jonathan's well-intended enthusiasm made both Ms. Merkin and me slightly uncomfortable. There followed a period of phone-tag attempts at arranging a get-together, a series of rescheduling near-misses that then trailed off into the busy-ness of New York life, although I think the ball was last in my court, where I let it lie.

So there the matter rested until January, when her disdainful piece disparaging the chopped liver wars as "borscht belt" stuff appeared. One hears in that condescending "borscht belt" sneer the old German Jewish disdain for the vulgarity of more recent Russian Jewish immigrants and their delight in American popular culture. I guess to Ms. Merkin, Groucho Marx is a less authentic Jew than her kind, although in some respects I'd argue that even borscht belt fixture Shecky Greene is more authentically Jewish than someone who looks down her nose at Jewish popular culture as evidence of "ethnic nostalgia."

But there is one other Warsaw writers club-type moment I should mention here. One that took place while we were still playing phone tag. A report I got about Ms. Merkin's reaction to a review of my book in The New York Times . The report, from a pretty good source, said that the day the review came out, someone asked Ms. Merkin, "Did you read the rave review Ron's Hitler book got in The Times ?" According to my source, her reply was not exactly the warm surge of delight for a fellow writer who spent an arduous 10 years of his life wrestling with a difficult book. It was more along the lines of, No, I haven't read it (the review), and I'm not going to.

Hey, that's understandable. I've been there. I've felt Glückschmerz (the opposite of Schadenfreude : not joy at another's sorrow, but sadness at another's good fortune; Glückschmerz is a coinage of "Wanda Tinasky," the pen name of a now silent columnist for a Californian newspaper, The Anderson Valley Advertiser , in the 80's, a writer some have identified as Thomas Pynchon). Glückschmerz is a major writerly emotion, let's face it. I'm not condemning it, I'm just wondering whether a little more stringent and honest self-examination on Ms. Merkin's part might have revealed to the author of Dreaming of Hitler (the paperback edition of which did not appear to offer any quotes from a Times review) that her disdainful disparagement of the motives of the author of Explaining Hitler , might seem , at least to some, to derive from a case of displaced Glückschmerz . Or should we call it "Hitler envy"?

While Lingua Franca , Mr. Kittay's tart non-glossy academic news magazine, is aimed at tweed- and Wallabee-wearing professor types and draws on advertising primarily from academic presses, University Business is a glossy four-color affair that targets the people who hold the purse strings-university presidents and financial officers. Unlike the idealistic faculty readers of Lingua Franca , Mr. Kittay said, "Administrators have a very strong pragmatic streak.…The trick is to respect the higher issues but also the real pragmatic demands on a dean or a provost. That's what looks different and smells different about the magazine."

Which is to say, after winning a National Magazine Award for digging up the dirt behind the ivy-covered walls of academe, Mr. Kittay is looking to make some money. Accordingly, a full-page color ad in University Business runs $5,920, about twice as much as it costs in Lingua Franca . Advertisers in the inaugural issue include AT&T Corporation and the Compaq Computer Corporation. Mr. Kittay, who owns the magazine with "two or three" minority investors, will give away 30,000 issues of the bimonthly magazine to high-ranking university officials and will offer paid subscriptions to everyone else.

University Business is going up against the more news-driven Chronicle of Higher Education , and aspires to provide school administrators and trustees with a more in-depth interpretation of education trends. The first issue contains features on the marketing of George Mason University, a for-profit franchise called the University of Phoenix and the multimillion-dollar distribution deals universities are making with soft drink companies like Pepsico and the Coca-Cola Company.

Lingua Franca loses money-Mr. Kittay won't say how much-and he's counting on University Business to make up the losses. He said he hopes to turn a profit in four years. The two magazines share an office and circulation staff, and like Lingua Franca, University Business will draw primarily on freelance writers for copy.

How will the freelance rates compare? "Let's put it this way," said Mr. Kittay. "At University Business , we have to compete for business writers. At Lingua Franca, we compete for cultural writers, so we can get away with more modest fees."

(The reporter and Mr. Kittay were co-defendants in a libel suit brought against Lingua Franca ; it was dismissed in 1996.)

Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin recently came up with an interesting way to put off writing his next book: He volunteered to take a part in Payday , a film written and directed by a second-year New York University film student named Sasha Oster.

Mr. Breslin plays "Mr. Tom," a bookie. He said he read the script and liked what he saw. "I'm in the middle of a book, in over my head. I shouldn't move," Mr. Breslin said. "So I told her Yes."

Mr. Breslin's character is idolized by a young Polish immigrant who hopes someday to be a successful bookie, just like Mr. Tom. When a local priest learns of the boy's aspirations, he challenges Mr. Breslin's character to dissuade the boy from a life of crime.

Mr. Breslin's co-star-"a 10-year-old Polish kid from Jersey"-was discovered through a want ad. The film was shot over two weeks in January, mostly in Red Hook and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Apparently, the old salt bonded with his young protégé. "Jimmy is a really good actor," Ms. Oster said. "He should be in more things if he'd put up with it."

"The tough part is the sitting," Mr. Breslin said. "It's cruel . It takes four hours to light a scene. You go crazy. It was dark. It was cold. Who the hell knows? The rules of acting are, know your lines and bring a book."

Speaking of which, Off the Record had the temerity to ask Mr. Breslin what his next book was about. "I'm finding out," he said. "It's fiction." Asked about his progress, Mr. Breslin said: "What the fuck do I do? I wake up at 4 in the morning, and I sit there till I'm done."

New Yorker staff members reacted with alarm to a Feb. 26 New York Times story on the new Condé Nast Building at 4 Times Square in which Dina Frank, one of the head interior designers for the new offices, was quoted as saying, "There's going to be little individual identity per magazine. It will be all Condé Nast." The spiritual descendants of Harold Ross and William Shawn, the comments implied, will soon be at one with the staff of Brides .

Some employees of Condé Nast Publications Inc. couldn't resist ribbing their entitled colleagues on West 43rd Street; they forwarded along copies of "Issue 1, Volume 1" of a flashy color newsletter-printed on "100 percent bamboo pulp"-put together by Condé Nast's human resources department. The newsletter trumpets the building's many features and works hard to allay anxieties staff members might be having over what it calls "the journey beyond Fifth Avenue."

First of all, the new building is "within walking distance of many of the city's most renown [sic] hot spots," the newsletter notes. "You'll find it's just a stone's throw away from our old stamping [sic] grounds on Madison Avenue." Furthermore, the human resources folks boasted, the new building "will be the 140th tallest building in the world and 25th highest in New York City."

Condé Nast president Steve Florio, in a letter to the troops, expresses his desire to include employees "in the growing momentum of our relocation" and points out that the building "resides between two very diverse identities-the northwest exposure looks out onto the vitality of Times Square and the southeast facade faces a more traditional environment, reflective of corporate midtown." Put another way, some offices in the building will look uptown, others downtown and the remaining offices will look crosstown.

Architect Frank Gehry also penned an evocative letter to Condé Nast staff members on their new corporate dining rooms: "The forms of the glass are soft and cloud like [sic]. The walls will be blue titanium and skylike … so the effect will be a series of soft, willowy lines, almost like moving blades of tall grass."

"Coming up next," the newsletter promises, "[Editorial director] James Truman discusses the interiors of Four Times Square."

Editors at the Daily News were desperate to publish excerpts from the latest Kennedy potboiler, Christopher Andersen's Jackie After Jack . But when they lost a 21-round bidding war to the New York Post -which published excerpts from the book on Feb. 21-25-the News did what any self-respecting tabloid would do: They panned the ever-living hell out of it.

Before the bidding war, the News worked hard to butter up the author. Mr. Andersen said that deputy features editor Jane Freiman called him personally and "said she felt it was the best Kennedy book ever written." But when the News lost the bidding war to the Post -which paid a mid-five-figure sum for second serial rights-the paper's fascination with Jackie After Jack changed dramatically. News reporter Paul Schwartzman was dispatched on Feb. 24 to take the book apart, which he did under the banner "In Fact, It's Fiction! No Basis for Salacious Tales in Jackie After Jack , Many Say." Mr. Schwartzman's piece reported that former Presidential aides were "dismissing" the work.

"It was a transparent effort to counter the Post ," Mr. Andersen complained. "You don't expect them to be so obvious." Said News editor in chief Debby Krenek, "We went out and talked to some people in the book and printed their reactions. It's not inconsistent with what we often do with books."

At a Barnard College lecture on Feb. 11, Daphne Merkin, a writer who has carved out a niche for herself confessing such bourgeois fantasies as, say, having her hair caressed by Hitler, was cornered by an audience member. The woman wondered aloud why Ms. Merkin, who hails from an Orthodox Jewish family, had not considered the shame brought on her parents by a piece she wrote revealing more sadomasochistic longings for The New Yorker 's Women's issue in 1996.

"I find it sort of strange that you wouldn't factor into your decision to publish the piece the knowledge that your parents would be exposed to a great amount of shame in that [Orthodox] community," said Aviva Cantor, a fellow alumna of Ms. Merkin's high school, the Ramaz School. "And the attendant guilt for exposing them to that shame … maybe guilt might cut off the motivation to publish."

Ms. Merkin turned and looked directly at her questioner in the front row. "I'm very interested, but you're not asking me anything, you're telling me," she said coolly.

Ms. Cantor let her have it. "My parents are dead," she announced to all the world, "but I would not be able to do such a thing."

Taking her cue, Ms. Merkin started talking-fast. "Well, maybe that makes you a better person-possibly it does-or a very different person," she said. "I mean, I think these factors are all factored in. I don't consider myself a psychologically unsettled person, um, I don't really, in fact, find it interesting … to sort of defend a piece that I wrote, and gave enormous thought to how I portrayed it. And I don't think [my parents] were exposed to massive shame, to be honest … nor do I know how many people in their actual synagogue, or shul, rushed out to read this piece. I don't know.… These are all things I thought about."

Having made her point, Ms. Merkin moved on to the next questioner. The Barnard girls tittered in the back row.