Judith West

Thanks to a successful interview with the painfully shy E.B. White, a beautiful, 19-year-old, blue-eyed blonde from the cornfields of Iowa lands a job as a receptionist at The New Yorker magazine. There she stays two decades, becoming general all-around factotum-watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the 18th floor. Though she dreamed...

From the pink ribbons to the chat rooms to the Web sites that sell related accessories and stuffed animals, breast cancer has morphed from a disease to an experience. And at every step of the way, society tells women that this experience can teach them profound lessons, transform them into wiser, more insightful people, and maybe even give them a peek at the meaning of life. But what if it doesn't? Five Lessons I Didn't Learn From Breast Cancer...