HALLIE EPHRON: In 2025 Susan Stamberg died. She was, one of my favorite people, a true role model for women writers.
She was a nationally renowned broadcast journalist, the first woman to anchor a nightly news program ("All Things Considered"), whose gravelly voice and raucous laugh were instantly recognizable. She was one of NPR's founding mothers, and she died soon after retiring from an illustrious 50-year career.
In 2007 I asked her if she'd consider writing a foreword to the then forthcoming 1001 BOOKS FOR EVERY MOOD. To my great joy she agreed.
It was so generous of her and I adore the piece she wrote.
"SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME" by Susan Stamberg
The pink couch in my parent’s living room was a refuge, growing up on 96th and Central Park West in Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s. That couch was the launchpad for my adventures in literature.
Now, as a journalist it behooves me to inform you that in truth the couch color was more rose than pink. And it was more a loveseat than a couch. But since some day I intend tattoo the motto “Never Let Facts Get In the Way of a Good Story” on a bicep, the small couch was pink because that’s how I remember it.
As a little girl I fit it neatly—head to toe, lying flat, shoes off, throw pillow under my head. Perfectly prone, I would read. And read. And read. First, after staggering home with a wobbly tower of slim hard-covers, on the pink couch I went through the entire Children’s section of the New York Free Circulating Library at Amsterdam Avenue and 100th Street.
And when I finished the Children’s section, I moved on—the tower of books getting heavier, and wobblier—to two of the day’s real steamers, A Rage to Live, and Forever Amber. The librarian noticed I’d strayed too far from The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and prevented any further checkouts of “adult” literature.
Eventually, I moved out of my parents’ house, away from the couch.
But my reading habits were by then ingrained, and I could turn a stiff wooden chair, an airplane seat, a park bench into that pink reading place.
Hallie Ephron is like the best, friendliest, hippest librarian you ever met. Her taste is exquisite, her writing’s a hoot, she’s done her homework, and it’s very clear that she loves, loves, loves books. She knows obscure ones like Dori Sander’s novel Clover, and prompts us back to classics we haven’t considered in years—Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.
Hallie has fine factoids, too. Is it really possible that Bridges of Madison County eventually out-sold Gone With the Wind? Or that Flaubert and his editors were put on trial because Madame Bovary was, in the mid-nineteenth century, deemed morally offensive? How quaint! How current!
I bet there’s a pink couch in Hallie Ephron’s background. It probably sits in her Milton living room right now. And for her, as it was for me, that couch is less about literature and more about transportation—a passport out of the house, and into the Dust Bowl or West Egg, Long Island or the Edmont Hotel in 1950s New York where Holden Caulfield took refuge after being thrown out of Pency Prep.
HALLIE: Of course Susan Stamberg was right, although our couch in our Californa living room was not pink, it was a shiny red and green jungle print.
My memory is of sitting nestled up against my mother as she read one of the OZ books to me. Or Eloise. Or Anne of Green Gables. Stories with little girls who are strong and defy stereotypes.
Do you have memories of someone early in your life reading to you, or some special place that gave you a head start on a life filled with books?
