She quit her job and wrote the novel in five months. While working at a publishing house in her 20s, Jaffe met a Hollywood producer who was looking for “a book about working girls in New York” to turn into a film when he told her the kind of salacious story line he was imagining, she thought it was ridiculous. Jaffe’s novel, now reissued, chronicles the lives of four young women in the early stages of their careers and romances. “If every nice girl had had a happy ending and had everything that she wanted,” she said, “I wouldn’t have had to write the book.” The Best of Everything-a play on the advertisement copy-was Jaffe’s attempt at capturing the real experiences of women around her and contending with the failure of that promise. “Today girls are freer to do what they want and be what they want and think what they want, and the trouble is they’re not quite sure what they want,” she said in a 1958 interview shortly after her first novel was published. The conundrum of that ad wasn’t lost on the author Rona Jaffe. Its implicit message was even more alluring: Women could be fulfilled by their job without having to compromise in other areas of their life. “The best job, the best surroundings, the best pay, the best contacts.” It was a promise of financial, emotional, and intellectual success-a guarantee that the working world would pay off. In the 1950s, The New York Times ran a job advertisement: “Help Wanted-Girls.” “You deserve the best of everything,” it read. ![]() ![]() This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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