Carole Radziwill

A deipnosophist is a person who's an adept conversationalist at table.

The table part's important.

The most adept deipnosophist I've ever known is a woman who's able to talk about books that have never been written as if they have been. She even gives them titles, plots, authorial substance.

After listening to one of her tales about a famous actor who led a double-life as a secret correspondent for The National Enquirer, I suggested she write the thing up.

"I'm a publisher," I said. "You're a famous or at least a semi-famous person who knows all these other famous and semi-famous people. Sprinkle a few more semi-recognizable names in, use your plot but add a few more semi-recognizable plot twists, and I think we'll have a best seller on our hands."

I never thought she'd leave the table, forsake making up phony books at the lavish, leisurely lunches we enjoyed, for the wretched loneliness of the writer's workshop, but much to my surprise she's done just that.

I just read about her book in The New York Times. She gave an interview to a reporter over lunch in The Grill Room of the Four Seasons, a place described as a Serengeti for billionaires.

I wish she'd told me about the book herself, I wish I'd had a chance to publish it, I wish I hadn't had to read about it in the newspaper and instead been able to hear it in her own words over a long leisurely lunch somewhere really nice. But I guess I never really knew her at all.