Here's How the Title Came About

When I started my research for Such Good Friends, in late 2019, just weeks after attending—by chance!—a preview of “The Collection of Lee Bouvier Radziwill” sale at Christies in New York, I was labelling my files “Serene Highness,” a title I was considering for the book based on the style of address associated with Lee’s title of Princess, which she acquired through her marriage to Prince Stanislaw Radziwill. In the book, my fictional character Marlene, created to function as an intimate of both Lee and Truman, is sometimes referred to privately by Truman as Serene Highness, with affection laced with sarcasm—and it seemed to me that the phrase made a nice, slightly twisty choice for the book’s title.

Yet the powers that be thought that focus on the friendship between Lee and Truman—which is the center of the book, after all--was a better direction for a title, and ultimately we all agreed on Such Good Friends. Titles, as you may know, are not copyrightable unless they qualify for trademark protection, and duplicates sometimes do recur in the continuing flow of literary output. Thus I am delighted to think that today’s readers of my book might also encounter author Lois Gould’s sharp 1970 book entitled Such Good Friends, which The Saturday Review called “more personal and honest and graphic than Portnoy's Complaint,” as well as the 1971 Otto Preminger film based on the book, of the same name, starring Dyan Cannon....