THE ONLY GIRL

A lusty, reflective, score-settling memoir from the woman who steered a chaotic career course between Rolling Stone and The Sopranos.

In this debut book, Green recounts the lively, raucous tale of how she found, lost, and regained her groove, smoking dope and winning Emmys in the process. The well-educated daughter of “upwardly striving East Side Jews,” she headed west in the late 1960s with a diploma from Brown University, a rich boyfriend, and only a vague sense of what to do when she got there. By dint of luck, as well as talent, Green wound up at Rolling Stone, scoring a cover story on Marvel Comics (where she had briefly worked) that established her trademark droll tone. “Go be ironic” was her mission, and she delivered with numerous significant pieces, including profiles of Dennis Hopper at his most obnoxious and David Cassidy at his most naïve. Besides breaking a pot-befogged glass ceiling—she distinguished herself among “the brainy and evolved sugar candy that was the girls of Rolling Stone”—she happily indulged her inner wild child. She also got sloppy—e.g., setting out to interview the children of the late Robert F. Kennedy, she “crossed a journalistic line” by sleeping with his son. Although her career briefly bottomed out, Green staged an impressive comeback as a TV writer who could navigate both the high (Northern Exposure, The Sopranos) and mid-range (Blue Bloods) plateaus. Her story is wildly picaresque—upper-middle-class to rags to homes in New York and Los Angeles—revealing (especially when dealing with the backstage politics of TV production), and at times wearyingly materialistic and self-absorbed.

Arriving on the heels of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Green’s memoir is both a solid insider’s account and a happy-go-lucky, lifelong coming-of-age story.