Sleeping With Bad Boys, Alice Denham's memoir about literary NY in the 1950s and 60s, reads like an intriguing, absorbing novel. Her talent for creating characters, not only the whole gallery of interesting people that appear in the book, but her very own narrative voice, is excellent. The well developed story line, with its twists of fate and suspense, creates an incredibly moving, tight, awesome under current of that so very special combine of the struggle for creativity, love, life itself.

Maria Arrillaga

Though this smart, well-written book will mostly be bought for its gossip, "Sleeping with Bad Boys" is an invaluable literary history source for certain American writers who emerged in the 1950s. We learn much about underappreciated novelist David Markson, for example, and especially about William Gaddis, for whom little biographical info exists. (Two of his letters are quoted in their entirety.) There are eye-opening passages about Mailer, Roth, Heller, Porter, and others, and shocking accounts of how old-boy misogyny persisted in the publishing community throughout the Sixties. This is probably the only work of literary history with a photo-insert of pinup images, but this an enlightening, impassioned book that deserves a wide readership.

The title of this book promises lots of steamy sex, and it delivers in spades. Denham loved sex, and makes no bones about it. From a strategic location in Greenwich Village she knew the leading literary lights of the fifties and sixties, and slept with any of them she cared to. Her descriptions are not so much graphic as emotionally complete. Some of her flights of lyricism are so wonderful that the male reader gets to experience what he can never experience, how it feels to a woman in the throes of ecstacy.
But, although Denham slept with a lot of stars, she was no starjumper. She politely turned down some of the biggest lit stars of the era, and managed to maintain good friendships with them at the same time. Her morality was not conventional, but nonetheless it was there. In the sixties when swinging came into vogue, and Plato's Retreat was the new hot thing in New York she was simply turned off by that scene. She did not require love, but she did require at least friendship and chemistry.
But, in spite of the title, and in spite of the beauty of the way it's rendered, sex is not the best thing about this book. The description of the lit life of the era surpasses that, and the description of the difficulties of being female at a time when women were second class, not thought worthy of their typewriters surpasses that. The best chapters of this book describe her friendship with Katherine Anne Porter. This is fine writing, deeply touching, and a great story.
Denham has never been given the credit she deserves as a serious writer. She is not merely good. She is magnificent.