"Everybody's taking something..."

"...or they'd never make it till morning." Theresa in Looking For Mr Goodbar.

Judith Rossner is dead; she was 70.

From the obit:

"In a 1983 interview with The Washington Post, Rossner said, "It's astonishing what some women will put up with just to have a warm body _ some of the brightest women I know are just obsessed with that search. It's very sad."
It was a subject she explored again and again.
"My abiding theme is separations," she said in the same interview. Her women yearn to connect with men or family to find love, but typically find it unattainable.
Most of her books, she said in the Post interview, "are about whether the heroine should leave, whether it's a husband, a mother, a home.""

From the NYT's 1975 review of Looking For Mr Goodbar:

It is a measure of "Mr. Goodbar's" richness and complexity that it can be read on many levels. Catholics might view it as a passion play; feminists might consider Theresa a political victim of rape. Men may focus on the book's sexuality. (Men have tended to overreact to the wider use of sex in recent writing by women, but I don't think there's all that much behind this new freedom: sex is simply another area of experience for the woman novelist to mine in the same sense that the freedom to write about being Jewish say, is for Jewish writers.) What adds to my view of "Mr. Goodbar" as an exploration of passivity is the angry and frustrated reaction of a number of women who have read the book. "Mr. Goodbar" may, for them, have driven the final stake through the heart of the axiom that passive is a good way to be if you're a woman.