‘I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm,’ says Mary Norris, as she considers her career options in the first section of this odd but charming cross between a memoir and a usage guide. ‘I liked cows: they led a placid yet productive life.’
Instead, she found a productive life — if not always as placid as she might have liked — as a copy editor on the New Yorker magazine. In Between You and Me, she presents the accumulated wisdom and winsome anecdotes of several decades of proof-reading, editorial queries and office arguments, ‘for all of you who want to feel better about your grammar’.
New Yorker memoirs are a genre of their own — no other publication generates such stylish mythology, in such bulk — but Mary Norris has something distinctive to add: a layer of clerical intrigue beneath the famous writers and distinguished editors.
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