Anne Roiphe nails it

I've never read a better depiction of the darker side of creativity than Roiphe's memoir Art and Madness, focusing on her late teens and twenties during the 1950s-60s when she was an artist-writer groupie, in essence, all this prelude to her own considerable achievements as a writer. She is frank and revealing, nails the period and its primary male forces, and raises questions about "art and madness" that may still be unresolved. This is as fine a memoir of the era as I've read. I haven't finished it yet and may have more to say later. From the book:

Only jazz musicians took drugs. It wasn’t that everyone else was cautious or uninterested. But the bar was open and men drank and writers drank more and no one I knew thought of this as a disease, no one intervened to prevent anyone else’s thirst. A dry writer was to be pitied.