Larry was the shoulder I cried on, leaned on, the person I called at 1 a.m. In New York, I faced a phalanx of male editors who had been forced to hire women, plus some female coworkers who did not necessarily cotton to an outsider winning a coveted writing spot after they’d had to sue for the right to be promoted. I would go for the long-term friendship.”Īfter Newsweek hired me out of San Francisco in late 1972 to be one of their first women writers, the adjustment was not exactly breezy. “If I thought a love affair would give me six months of intense pleasure but that this woman I had a real affinity for would not be in my life 10 years from now,” he once told me, “I would walk around the love affair if there was one to be walked around. He was willing to wait, he said, for years to see if anything might spark, and meanwhile he would keep writing us letters, buying us dinners or antique necklaces, sending flowers to our mothers, and just generally being a prince while we got our hearts chewed up by less worthy boys.

Through the years there became a small circle of us-women Larry cultivated and cared for, but didn’t necessarily sleep with. Larry was supremely generous and stubbornly patient. Wandering into his Georgetown bookstore one day in 1972, shortly after the film adaptation of his novel The Last Picture Show had won two Oscars, I was looking for a cowboy book for my then boyfriend and had no idea that our chance encounter would lead to one of the most profound friendships of my life.

Larry McMurtry loved, respected, and appreciated women more than any man I ever knew.

Author larry mcmurtry