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Hearing those opening lines, “Once upon a time you dressed so fine,” my stomach started churning with dread. As the lyrics continued, “How does it feel, ah how does it feel…,” I sensed Dylan’s anger, the vindictiveness in his voice — “Now you don’t talk so loud / Now you don’t seem so proud…”— and I wondered, what in the world did this girl ever do to him?
I don’t know why, after living with this song for so long, soaking it up as it was piped into supermarkets coast to coast, I was devastated—no, leveled—that evening by the force of his rage. It was as if I were hearing it for the first time. Maybe it was the bleakness of winter 2025: the reelection of Donald Trump; the proudly misogynist men around him mouthing vile phrases like “Your body, my choice.”
Whatever it was, suddenly the cruelty in Dylan’s words seemed plain and clear. Coming from a songwriter who’d arrived in Greenwich Village all those years ago with a sticker on his guitar that said “This machine kills fascists,” in an homage to Woody Guthrie, it was almost too much to bear.
The truth was, I identified with “Miss Lonely,” the “princess on a steeple,” friend of all the “pretty people”; it felt very personal to me, as though Dylan hated me and was celebrating my destruction. The violence in his voice, the sneering contempt in his words, took me back to a time in my life that I’ve never truly gotten over, that I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to forget.
Back then, I was living on my own in Boston, working a bunch of dead-end jobs, moving from one makeshift apartment to another, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Just like Miss Lonely, I’d recently graduated from one of the finest schools, Smith College, with a bachelor’s degree in English, which equipped me to do exactly nothing.
And nothing was exactly what I was doing. I tried to keep myself busy. I took up jogging, studied karate, and meditated in earnest. I also made sure the door was double- or triple-locked in case some scary guys I knew from college showed up on my street. Then one day, over coffee, my older brother suggested I might enjoy reading detective stories, a big departure from the serious works of literature I’d been studying in college.
I started with his favorite, Nero Wolfe, the invention of Rex Stout. Wolfe was a brilliant, obese detective who lived in a brownstone on West 35th Street in Manhattan and rarely, if ever, left the house. He spent his days reading the books in his vast personal library, tending ten thousand orchids in his rooftop greenhouse, and feasting on gourmet meals prepared by his personal chef, Fritz Brenner. Naturally, none of this ever stopped him from solving the crime.
I tried to like the books, thought they might lift my depression, toughen me up. But even though I enjoyed descriptions of delicacies like capon Souvaroff, a castrated male chicken cooked with madeira and truffles, or his annual feast of starlings with sage and polenta, I found the overall setup preposterous, offering neither inspiration nor escape.
Though Wolfe didn’t help, I didn’t give up on the idea of finding another detective who might. I moved on to Robert B. Parker, whose novels featured Spenser, the tough private eye known only by his last name. The fact that he introduced himself as the namesake of the Elizabethan poet, with an “s,” endeared him to me and made me feel that I hadn’t read The Faerie Queene in vain. It also meant a lot to me that he was in love with a sexy Jewish psychologist, Susan Silverman, who was roughly his age; I saw that, in and of itself, as a blow against the patriarchy.
I liked Spenser a lot—his invigorating five-mile runs through Boston, and the pork tenderloin en croute he prepared for his first date with Susan—but he was still pretty macho and not what I needed. In the meantime, I had altered my old habits. I quit smoking. I bought sleek nylon running shorts. I applied to a graduate program in English at the University of Texas at Austin, where I figured I could jog in the winter without having to dodge six-foot-tall snowdrifts.
As part of the curriculum, we had to take a course on how to write an annotated bibliography. While my classmates chose the most important thinkers of that era, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, I picked Ross Macdonald, who created the private eye Lew Archer, played by Paul Newman in the movies.
After Macdonald, I discovered Janwillem van de Wetering, whose books about a pair of Amsterdam police detectives were steeped in his personal experiences in a Zen monastery in Japan. I, too, was interested in the Zen notion of nothingness, but I found the characters annoying and the casual misogyny depressing.
Then one day, in the mystery aisle of a bookstore, I stumbled upon Kinsey Millhone, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Kinsey was the creation of Sue Grafton, who wrote a few shelves of books about her, each one beginning with a letter of the alphabet, which was why they were routinely referred to as the alphabet series: A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, C is for Corpse, etc. She solved crimes in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California, which was a stand-in for Santa Barbara, just a few hours up the coast from where I landed after grad school, working at a newspaper in San Diego.
Kinsey’s parents were killed when she was five in a horrific car crash that she survived. She was sent to live with her mother’s sister, Aunt Gin; but essentially, she grew up on her own. Later, she trained to be a cop with the Santa Teresa police force, but quit because she got sick of the bureaucracy and the shabby treatment of women. At that point, she struck out on her own as a private investigator, which was how she was employed when the series began.
When I first met her, we were roughly the same age but from very different backgrounds. She never had any money; my family did. Though she’d never gotten over the trauma of losing her parents at such a young age, I grew up, family intact, in an ostensibly safe little town. But looking back, I can see that even when I was young, there was a hint of violence simmering under the surface, a random swastika carved into a wooden desk at school, the occasional epithet, “dirty Jew,” hurled in the schoolyard or on the street, not to mention the leers and jeers of horny teenage boys during puberty—and after.
By the time I encountered Kinsey, it had occurred to me that maybe all crime stories are about people surviving violence. Kinsey had, and I had too. Yet from the time I was little, I couldn’t bear to watch fighting, bloodshed— any display of cruelty—on TV or in the movies. Kinsey, on the other hand, chose violence. It was the opposite, I suppose, of finding it unbearable.
In every novel, she was beaten up or assaulted, as in this passage from B is for Burglar:
Okay, the “dance with death” and “before the orchestra packs it in for the night” were a little corny. But what was so bracing about the passage, so instructive for me as a human being, not a writer, was her attitude. She wasn’t thinking, oh my god, what did I do wrong? Why was I so stupid?
Her face was completely fucked up, she didn’t know what was going to happen next, and she was thinking, oops, they tried to kill me again. It was the nonchalance that got me, especially since I was reading the novel not long after I’d been struck so hard on the side of my face that my head vibrated like an alarm. As I read that passage and so many others, I thought to myself, even if they kill her, they can never take her toughness away.
She was a loner, a bit of a misanthrope, determined to lead her life the way she wanted to. Twice-divorced, with no kids, no pets, not even houseplants until her landlord, Henry, gave her an air fern because it required absolutely no maintenance, she didn’t have, want, or need a lot of stuff.
She lived alone in a studio apartment, formerly Henry’s one-car garage, jogged three miles a day, and rarely wore anything but sneakers, jeans, and a windbreaker. Then there was the way she ate: She didn’t make a big fuss about food like Nero Wolfe or Spenser—or my mother, a very fine cook who once told us, her five children, that she wanted her last meal to be white asparagus and the very thinnest gravlax (though like so many others with terminal cancer, it ended up being applesauce and Ensure).
Still, Kinsey had very particular likes and dislikes, including her go-to set of meals. Grafton repeats them in each book so they take on the quality of a code of honor, a principled decision about how to live in a grasping, acquisitive, materialistic world: a sliced hard-boiled egg on wheat bread with lots of mayo and salt; a peanut butter (Jif Extra Crunchy) and pickle (Vlasic or Mrs. Fanning’s Bread’n Butter) or olive-pimento cheese sandwich. She had no qualms about popping into a McDonald’s late at night for a quarter-pounder with cheese, large fries, and a Coke— topping them off with a fried apple pie “full of hot glue that burns the fuck out of your mouth,” which for her was “pure heaven.”
Most important to me: when she was finished with a meal, she stopped eating. That was my fantasy: being able to stop. Being totally disciplined, motivated, self-contained. Forever moving forward, solving the crime. But the binge eating disorder I’d been struggling to get under control since the age of fourteen always seemed to get in the way.
Still, I tried to come up with my own version of her hard-boiled-egg sandwich when I came home late to a dark, empty apartment. I’d stop at the convenience store down the street, pick up a can of Progresso New England clam chowder, a small bag of Fritos, and a package of Five Flavor Life Savers (cherry, orange, lemon, lime, and pineapple), and that was dinner, designed to satisfy all the major taste sensations—creamy, salty, crunchy, sweet—but strictly portion-controlled.
I imagined that Kinsey would have appreciated my bare cupboards. Unlike my mother or Spenser or Wolfe’s personal chef, I had no capers or anchovies or sun-dried tomatoes lying around in case I got the urge to whip up a pasta puttanesca. Indeed, I had nothing in my cupboards except coffee beans, filters, and a few bottles of Three-Buck Chuck.
Besides her spartan eating habits and spartan life, I also admired the candor with which she freely admitted that she suffered from “a disconcerting melancholy.” I did too. Not incapacitating, but nevertheless real. In E is for Evidence, which takes place over the Christmas holidays when Henry is away, she thinks:
It’s not my style to be lonely or to lament, even for a moment, my independent state. … I find solitude healing and I have a dozen ways to feel amused. The problem was I couldn’t think of one. I won’t admit to depression, but I was in bed by 8:00 P.M. … not cool for a hard-assed private eye waging a one-woman war against the bad guys everywhere.
I’d been there myself so many times, in bed by eight or nine, even on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Memorial Day weekend, gripped by loneliness, ground down by despair, unable, like Kinsey, to think of a single way to feel amused. But as Kinsey demonstrated in book after book—through Y is for Yesterday, the last one Grafton wrote before she died—nothing could keep her from getting up the next morning to wage her one-woman war against the bad guys everywhere.
There was something about her that gave me hope and made me think of a famous Raymond Chandler essay about the art of detective fiction:
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. … He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
The world Chandler was describing in 1944 was one “in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities,” one that felt terribly familiar today as I scanned the latest headlines about yet another gangster who was being appointed to one of the highest offices in the land.
But why, I wondered, both then and now, did the hero Chandler described have to be a man, especially when so many of the bad things that were happening in the world were happening to women, and men were the ones who were doing them? Why couldn’t it be Kinsey with her busted-up face, windbreaker and jeans, and sliced-hard-boiled-egg sandwiches washed down with a big glass of white wine?
Why, for that matter, couldn’t it be me?
Author's Comment
2025 has been a difficult year. Lately, I’ve been thinking back to the days when I read detective fiction to learn how to toughen up in a world where “gangsters can rule nations,” as Raymond Chandler once said. But Chandler was never my guy. I preferred Sue Grafton, whose female private eye, Kinsey Millhone, loved hard-boiled-egg sandwiches, three-mile jogs, and walking down Chandler’s mean streets alone. This essay, “Hard-boiled,” reflects on what she’s meant to me over the years.
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Ann Levin is a writer, book critic, and former editor at the Associated Press. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Coachella Review, Craft Literary, The Inquisitive Eater, and other literary magazines. She has also read her stories onstage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read.
Judi Silvano has been a member of the Wallkill River Center for the Arts for 15 years and joined the Board of Directors in 2023 as Music Curator. She is a painter, singer, composer, lyricist, has released 14 albums to critical acclaim, taught Voice at Rutgers University, children at Newburgh Academy, and now teaches International Master Classes in “Freeing the Voice”.
Relevant while living under the miss-rule of the King of Misogeny.
A compelling read. Not a reader of detective stories, you have inspired me to open my eyes! Thank you.
Brilliant, superb!!!
SUPERB!! Being vision-impaired, I listened to it, an’d it is a fabulous reading, one of the best I’ve ever heard. Howard also got me into detective fiction.
I’m thrilled to be part of your Winter 2026 issue – it’s a beautiful issue!