Coping: Still Here

Think back. Was that Betsy Carter's name you saw in the gossip columns in 1986? That was the year that Carter, the former editorial director of Esquire, launched New York Woman, an edgy, sophisticated magazine for urban women. For Carter--accomplished, energetic, at center stage of the Manhattan magazine world--those must have been exciting, happy times, right? Wrong. While her career flourished, Carter's private life was rocked by a sequence of injury, illness, divorce and other disasters so relentless and extensive that it would be almost laughable if it hadn't been so painful. Carter, 57, now the editor in chief of My Generation, looks back on it all in a new memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist (Hyperion). As her subtitle suggests, the book is surprisingly upbeat. "I didn't want people to feel sorry for me, because I don't feel sorry for me," she says. "And I didn't want to make people sad, because mine isn't a sad story. I really wanted to convey that this was just part of a life that had happened. This business is you're up, you're down, you're up, you're down. So I've been both."

Carter's Job-like ordeal began in 1983, when a taxi she was riding in crashed into a car. "There was blood," she writes. "I saw a hand I recognized as my own, shaking. My teeth. They'd come undone. This had to be a dream." Outfitted with temporary teeth, Carter went back to the office one week after the accident. "Magazine work is the perfect antidote to personal crises," she writes. "Deadlines supersede tragedy; there are events that must be attended."

Around the time of the New York Woman launch, her husband of 17 years, Malcolm Carter, announced he was gay. "Everything inside me felt berserk," she writes. "Blown to pieces. I was gasping for breath, swimming in air. I had crazy thoughts: I'll call my mother, she'll talk him out of this."

Again, Carter threw her energies into the office. That's where she was a few months later when her marketing director relayed an emergency phone message: "Betsy, your house burned down!" Her weekend home in upstate New York was a total loss in a fire begun by an arsonist. Writes Carter: "Putting one foot in front of the other: I was getting very good at that. Understanding the pattern and meaning of what happened over the past couple of years was harder. I'd lost my teeth, my ability to bear children [because of an earlier hysterectomy], my husband, my house, and everything in it. Stripped bare again and again. If this were a movie, I'd skip to the end and pray for a happy ending. But this was my life, and there was no easy fast forward."