The Best of Everything

Praise

“I finally picked it up recently and was blown away by Jaffe’s sharp, fizzy writing; her pointed analysis of women’s roles and restrictions; and her matter-of-fact depiction of sexual harassment in the workplace decades before the Clarence Thomas hearings or #MeToo…I had no idea that anyone in the ’50s was writing like this.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Jaffe… writes at the breakneck pace of a Sex and the City season finale and with the wry knowingness of a Nora Ephron novel…it’s by turns enraging and poignant to read this book with post-#MeToo eyes, to appreciate how much women’s lives have changed in the intervening decades and what’s at stake when our hard-won rights to workplace equality and abortion care are threatened.”
—Forward

“Lively, delightful and heartbreaking… The book is not tawdry; it’s terrific…‘The Best of Everything’ seized the mood of the moment and told the truth, and women by the millions devoured it. Sixty-five years later, I did, too.”
—Star Tribune

“An incredibly pleasurable and devastating novel — do yourself a favor and get a copy.”
—The Cut

“At no point in the story do [the characters] really ‘make it,’ but in the meantime, they get as much from the world around them as they possibly can, trying to wrangle proposals or free steaks or promotions or raises out of the men who hold sway over their life. The intensity of their desire, their desperation, is riveting.”
—The Atlantic

“Sixty years later, Jaffe’s classic still strikes a chord, this time eerily prescient regarding so many of the circumstances surrounding sexual harassment that paved the way toward the #MeToo movement.”
—BuzzFeed