An extraordinary love story at the heart of the New Yorker

She, Lillian Ross, was for more than half a century one of the magazine's most prolific and iconic journalists New Yorker, author of several pieces that have gone down in the history of modern journalism, for example a profile she wrote in 1950 about the ebullient but somewhat caricature-like Ernest Hemingway. He, William Shawn, was not only the editor-in-chief for more than forty years of the New Yorker He was not only the man who transformed the legendary weekly into the world's most prestigious publication, but he was also the man who transformed the legendary weekly into the world's most prestigious publication, all thanks to a perfectly bold, rigorous, and balanced blend of extensive and in-depth journalism, literature, humor, and meticulous attention to every detail of journalistic work, from fact-checking to keystrokes. Although he was married with children and never neglected his family, Shawn and Ross fell in love and, for four decades, shared their lives, never hiding from anyone, not even his wife and children. Here, but not quite These are the memoirs that Ross wrote about that unique and memorable love story.

Although to say so is an unfairly reductionist presentation. Ross's book, published in 1998, just six years after Shawn's death, has at its core the love story—the extramarital, but romantically conjugal, cohabitation—between the editor and the journalist, but it quickly broadens its scope, filling up with star-studded supporting characters (Harold Ross JD Salinger, John Huston, Joe Mitchell, Charlie Chaplin, Hannah Arendt, Humphrey Bogart, Duke Ellington, William Faulkner...) and branches out thematically in a way that is as elegant as it is energetic. Ten reviews wouldn't be enough to capture all the anecdotes, reflections, and curiosities related to love, the profession, and the business of journalism, to art and politics, to the management (full of pitfalls and dangers) of one's own talent and the talent of others, that fill the pages of this book.

In the preface to this edition, which serves to remind us once again of the magnificent work Saldonar does in publishing crucial non-fiction narrative titles in Catalan, Lillian Ross explains that she began writing the book as if it were one of her reports for the New YorkerIndeed, readers of the magazine will find the two hallmarks of the magazine: precise, dense, and transparent prose, never gratuitous—each sentence conveys information—nor exhibitionist—without rhetorical stridency that diverts the reader's attention—and an ability to observe and explain the world and the individuals who populate it as if they were themselves.

A tenderness and gratitude that move

But above all, the book is a beautiful and highly intelligent posthumous declaration of love that Ross dedicates to the man of her life. Her portrait of William Shawn—a man whom the greatest writers and journalists of 20th-century America "revered" and sought after to beg him to help them improve their writing—is neither idolatrous nor mythologizing. On the contrary: she also recounts his phobias, ailments, and difficulties, but she does so with a tenderness and gratitude that are moving. A structural unease ran through Shawn's life from beginning to end, and he often repeated the phrase that gives the book its title: "I'm here, but not quite." This intimate unease, this feeling of being "more of a ghost than a man," Shawn suffered because he believed he had sacrificed his true vocation, that of a creative writer, to serve others and the prestige of the New YorkerIt's this fundamental vocational split that most distinguishes him from his beloved. If Shawn spent his life never quite sure he was doing what he truly wanted and was meant to do, Ross's style and tone radiate the prodigious vitality of a pioneering female journalist who always knew her calling and was always able to fully pursue it, often with extraordinary results. Just as this book is extraordinary.