 What's true of Ross's accounts of Shawn?
At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word."
 She contradicts herself often. She describes him one way than an inverse way pages later.
 She had a difficult time describing her true feelings.  She contradicts herself often. She describes him one way than an inverse way pages later.  She tells the objective truth about her and Shawn, and the relationship they shared.  She has a habit of glorifying Shawn.