t littlIP.1'1"1111111"'' 13 Friday, November $, 198 5 '3. • THE DETROIT J ENSH NEWS 0 Now It's Out: Rona Jaffe Didn't Attend Her Class Reunion As her 12th book, After The Reunion, hits the best seller lists, the high priestess of female angst talks about why she avoided the reunion of her class at Radcliffe, and where an entire generation went wrong. BY ARTHUR J. MAGIDA Special to The Jewish News in her books seem to take every few minutes. It is somewhere near the begin- ning of a four-month coast-to-coast book tour for Jaffe and down the road lie Bos- ton and Toronto and Cleveland and Seat- tle and San Francisco and Dallas and Min- neapolis. There's a whole nation out there waiting to hear what Rona Jaffe has to say. And waiting to read what she has to write. What Rona Jaffe says, she says well. And what she writes, she sells well. Jaffe is a pro. She's been playing the writer's game since the age of 26 when her first book, The Best of Pl; thing, cornered a hold on the best seller lists. Her twelfth and latest book, After the Reunion, seems destined to have a similar success. Out for just over a month, it's on The New York Times best seller list — and still climbing. Jaffe knows how to tout her wares. There will be talk shows and call-in shows and audience participation shows that Jaffe does so well. There will be quiet tete- a-tetes with local journalists and book- signing stints at Walden book shops in hermetically sealed shopping malls where women who lead lives of the quietest des- peration will come up to her and tell her their deepest and darkest secrets. For Rona Jaffe is someone they can trust. Rona Jaffe is someone they can call their own, even though she has never been married, has no children and carries none of the hush-hush stigmata which they whisper, almost conspiratorially, into her ear as she scribbles her name into yet another of her books. And usually around 10 or 11 at night She's the high priestess of female angst, covering the whole dismal spectrum from boy-chasing in college and the first blush of puppy love to the cruel pain of broken marriages, rampant alcoholism, desperate psychotherapy, children's suicides, and husbands who may cheat (with men or women, depending on their mood) or are so impotent they would just rather be left alone. It's a hard world that Rona Jaffe writes about in book after book after book. Often, it's not a particularly pretty world. But despite the marital or filial or alcoholic or pharmaceutical disasters that fill the pages of her books, Jaffe is not down at the mouth. She's bright and perky. She ha an easy laugh. For someone who doesn't give her characters the smoothest of lives, she has a good sense of humor. In fact, Rona Jaffe seems to have had a fairly good time of it herself. She enjoyed the privileges of being an only child. She matriculated at Radcliffe at 15 and was be- friended by motherly sophomores who showed her the ropes. She managed to get a berth at Briggs Hall, where, she recalls, "the most popular girls lived" and, thus, with Radcliffe's official imprimatur of be- ing more than a "nice" girl, even a "popu- lar" one, Jaffe had a rollicking good time in college at an age when most girls were safe and secure under their parents' roofs. But here sits Rona Jaffe, more than two decades out of college and more popular than ever, at least, if her book sales are any indication. There's a full cup of coffee in front of her that she has barely touched and a half-eaten egg and she's taking one of those deep breaths that the characters Continued on Page 40 • Craig Terkowit.