Maureen Dowd’s Dateless Friend

One of the harshest moments in Kathryn Harrison’s pan of Are Men Necessary? in Sunday’s NYTBR comes towards the end:

“‘A friend of mine called nearly in tears the day she won a Pulitzer,’ Dowd reports in a passage about men threatened by successful women. ‘”Now,” she moaned, “I’ll never get a date!”‘ Reading this, I can’t help wondering if Dowd is that self-same ‘friend.’ After all, it’s rare that she resists naming her friends, most of whom have names worth dropping…”

Ouch—but could it be true? The insinuation rang false as soon as I read it, and this morning I remembered why: My FishbowlNY blogmate had declared two weeks earlier that the anecdote’s about Michiko Kakutani. Which is a totally reasonable inference from the wording of Ariel Levy’s profile of Dowd, which also keeps the friend unnamed but helpfully points out that Kakutani won a Pulitzer in ’98. So: Is the NYTBR simply being kind enough not to suggest in print that the paper’s leading book critic couldn’t get a date, or could Kathryn Harrison be playing it safe with the critic who’s called her work “mesmerizing” and declared that she “writes with such assurance, such matter-of-fact sympathy for her characters, that readers are slowly but surely induced to succumb to the spell of her hothouse world”? (And has Ariel Levy decided she’s never going to attract Kakutani’s attention anyway, so why hold back?)

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