Woody Allen’s New York—and Mine

I saw Woody Allen onscreen for the first time as a 17-year-old, a senior at an all-girls Catholic school in a small New England town called Riverside. In the middle-class Rhode Island suburb where I was brought up, the type of person Woody Allen plays in Manhattan—a glib, disaffected, neurotic, middle-aged TV writer—did not exist. Or if they did, I had no knowledge of them—and that’s probably the way it should be, though one really cannot tell the story of Allen’s life and work without thinking at least a little about strange relationships between middle-aged men and high-school-aged girls.