Torch Song

by Anne Roiphe

Unhappy Jewish girl meets and marries unhappier (read: sadistic) blond Gentile. Despite worldly successes things get worse.

249 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Over a four-decade career, Roiphe has proven so prolific that the critic Sally Eckhoff observed, "tracing Anne Roiphe's career often feels like following somebody through a revolving door: the requirements of keeping the pace can be trying." (Eckhoff described the writer as "a free-thinking welter of contradictions, a never-say-die feminist who's absolutely nuts about children"). Roiphe published her first novel, Digging Out, in 1967. Her second, Up The Sandbox (1970), became a national best-seller and made the author's career.

Roiphe has since published seven novels and two memoirs, while contributing essays and reviews to The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and others. In 1993, The New York Times described her as "a writer who has never toed a party line, feminist or otherwise." Her 1996 memoir Fruitful A memoir of Modem Motherhood was nominated for the National Book Award

From 1997 to 2002, she served as a columnist for The New York Observer. Her memoir Epilogue was published in 2008, and another memoir, Art and Madness, in 2011.