When I was writing The Adventuress column for Domino, Ingrid Abramovitch was employed at our big sister publication House and Garden doing wonderful features on interior designers like Roy McMakin and Kelly Wearstler. Domino staffers always thought of HG in slightly competitively terms - maybe they were a little glossier,...

Read Susan Squire's highly entertaining new social history, I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage (Bloomsbury) and you will finally understand how we got ourselves into this mess. As it turns out, the mess has been several thousand years in the making. It's rooted in the tenacious but ultimately futile...

As a kid, did you ever finish a book and want to call one of the characters? Find out more, keep the story going a little longer, hear how they sounded on the phone? It's not such a far-fetched idea; novelists base their characters on friends and relatives. When I...