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feeling sick. I threw up on the carpet in the nursery, Mademoiselle's room. She made me eat my vomit off the carpet and sent me to school. That afternoon when I came home she locked me in her closet for punishment. She said I was pretending to be sick to get out of school. I wished there were scissors in her closet. I would cut her clothes in half. Maybe I did. I don't remember." T he idyllic and concise romance with the decade older John Sargent — she was 17, a student at Miss Porter's; he was angling to rise up the Doubleday ladder — played out one Saturday in late December, 1951, at a debutante dance at the Pierre, on the couple's first date. He was a friend of her older half-sister and a frequent houseguest. Neltje writes, "He and I had spent many evenings over the years coping with my mother when she had too much to drink, listening to her teary stories of being slighted or not having the control she wanted in the company [after Neltje's father's death] … Watching parents, mine or those belonging to others — in fact, adults of any age — getting drunk was an ordinary experience for me." At the ballroom of the Pierre, "We danced around the highly polished floor to Lester Lanin's music, he was in a tuxedo, me in a low- cut, virtually strapless evening dress, the bodice ornamented with crystal drops and sequins, the swinging bouffant skirt of dusty pink tulle. My other date (I always took two boys to the dance) was there, but I have no memory of even who it was. … It was close to midnight: the band was playing a Strauss waltz. We stepped on the dance floor … then began the liquid motions of the Vienna Waltz. He bent his head down close to my ear, 'Marry me?' " Opening the book mid-volume, I turn to a page, transfixed, reading of a wedding day carefully choreographed by the mother of the bride: "John and I got married on May 16, 1953. I was eighteen and he would be twenty-eight in late June. My mother chose the date because the azaleas and rhododendron that lined the driveway of our home on Long Island would be in full bloom. She even insisted that the gardeners place dry ice around the base of the azalea bushes to maintain perfect blossoms if necessary, and she ensured that our wedding did not interfere with Nelson's final exams at Princeton. I was personally paying for this wedding but was not allowed to say how many people or even who should be invited, nor allowed to interfere with any of the arrangements … I sat in the sun on the far end of the terrace, writing thank you notes, took breathers to wander about the lawn, look over the woods to Oyster Bay. I stopped thinking of anything by the physicality of the day of the wedding. My mother was furious when she found me getting a tan. She told me to go in the house immediately, and said it was indecent and lewd for a bride to have a suntan at her wedding." There are many other page-turning passages in North of Crazy: life in a Swiss boarding school where rich adolescent girls are parked by absentee, disinterested parents; chatting with a young Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at a tony private reception in Windsor Castle that she and a boarding school pal attended with the husband of Daphne du Maurier; getting into a nasty conversation during her own dinner party with publishing legend Bennett Cerf that derailed her first marriage; a drunken author who was a house guest coming after her with a knife in the kitchen … And that's the first half of the book. The raw and sensitive emotions that bubble up, paired with Neltje's gift for descriptive detail that conjure up each place, era, and remembered conversation, amount to time travel. A fter reading North of Crazy, I resolve to meet its author, on her home turf, which appears in the final uplifting chapters. In the book, her favorite childhood memories are of nature — going fishing in a flat-bottom boat amid the rice fields around the Doubleday plantation, Bonny Hall, in Yemasee, South Carolina — so perhaps it's no surprise she found and forged a new life in a spot less traveled. Neltje's Wyoming is far away from her posh life as a young married entertaining authors at her Sutton Place apartment, while husband John Sargent presides over the table. After extensive emails and arrangements with Neltje's publicist, I board a flight to Billings, Montana. The Airbus is filled Neltje at home in Wyoming, Summer 2016, with her circa-1972-1974 portrait by Gordon Krause MARY JANE EDWARDS 75