Given the title, I thought this book would be right up my alley: sad, perhaps bleak, taking place in New York. However, it was indeed sad but in the way it was written - a diary-like, flowery, full of inprecise descriptions, unknown owners of pronouns, poetic prose... I think some readers will highly enjoy this (I already recommended it to a friend), but I could not. To understand the book you have to understand Smart's life as The Other Woman... but even then I was hard pressed to understand much in the book.

The second part of this edition has a follow-up written several years later, and it's more cohesive and easier to understand (she'd definitely grown as a writer, and essentially grown up), but it's not really good writing.

I just didn't like it. Though I know others will.