Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Theresa Dunn is a good teacher. She works with deaf first-graders on the Upper West Side, she is patient and gifted with them, and the children love her. At night she goes to the bars on the same avenues and takes men home, choosing badly and knowing it, keeping the two halves of her life sealed from each other and from her Irish Catholic family in the Bronx.

Judith Rossner opens the novel with a confession to Theresa's murder and then goes back to find out how a woman arrives at that door. Behind the sexual freedom of the decade she puts childhood polio, a spinal fusion, a scar Theresa cannot forgive, and a long affair with a married professor — a portrait of self-punishment that the book refuses to moralise about.

Published by Simon & Schuster in 1975 and loosely based on the killing of the New York schoolteacher Roseann Quinn, it became one of the decade's defining bestsellers and was filmed in 1977 with Diane Keaton.