The Morgenthaus, the late New York mayor Ed Koch once said, were “the closest thing we’ve got to royalty in New York City.”

Mary Rodgers’s posthumous autobiography is a brash, outrageous and entertaining excursion into the life of its author.

When the ancient rabbis had a question about the Torah—an important detail that seemed to be missing, an inconsistency between two passages, even a redundant word or verse—they would often solve the problem by writing a midrash, or story, filling in the missing piece or reconciling the seeming contradiction.