20Q1-FPE calls "literary TV"; his very first novel (thirteen years ago) was THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE, one of those excellent third person characterizations. The several novels in between have been quite conventional. This one differs in being so utterly convincenly feminine that it has excited the attention of many reviewers, all of whom express their admiration of the achievement. It is not a particularly happy story, being the chronicle of one long day of psychological crisis during which Mary has many reasons to recall her past in a series of flash-backs. To begin with, there is her "hateful premenstrual tension". "The curse that comes once a month, making me murderous one minute, suicidal the next, weepy, sick, silly, confused, and I sit here appalled, feeling some other self within me beginning to go berserk". This sense of duality haunts her day, and "the mad twin" nearly drives her to jimp off the fire escape. Her past is a varied one, involving two failed marriages each of which left a burden of guilt, a period as an unsuccessful actress, a rise from being a backwoods girl who has pyramided her gains into life as the pampered wife of a writer of box-office hits, and a few sexual adventures. The latter are really of no great concern to her, and her problem is not one of sexuality, but of identity what has been called the characteristic problem of modern culture. Despite all her troubles, she retains her ability to laugh at herself (something I could stand to see more of in OUR sisterhood!) and is a very lively, attractive and properly feminine person.

There is no way of telling whether Mr. Moore carried his two years of "taking his own life and transmogrifying it into hers" to the logical extreme of dressing up for his daily battles with the typewriter, and no real reason to suspect it. He has, I think, found a way to come to terms with his "anima" that satisfies him in about the same way that dressing does us but brings him honor instead of the scorn he would reap by showing MARY in three dimensions. Actually, he has outdone all but the very best of us in that he never hits a false note and who among us can pretend that she has kept up to that standard? Even Virginia has been known to draw a polite "Yes, Sir" from a clerk on the phone, much to her dismay! I've been around and heard some big talk about how we "think like women", but I've never seen a TV (and darned few TSs) who do it so well, truly and naturally as Moore. In an interview with John Barkham of the Saturday Review, he said "I like being in the company of

70