Judith Rossner, 70; Writer of ‘Looking for Mr. Goodbar’ Had a Flair for the Strange, Suspenseful

Judith Rossner, the best-selling novelist whose “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” was made into a popular movie, died Tuesday in New York City, according to her husband, Stanley Leff. She was 70.

Rossner died at NYU Medical Center of complications from diabetes and leukemia, her husband said Wednesday.

Rossner was known best for the emotion-charged “Goodbar,” which is based on the true story of New York City schoolteacher Roseann Quinn, who was in her late 20s when she was murdered by a man she brought home from a bar. The book was made into a movie in 1977 with Diane Keaton as the teacher and Richard Gere as her killer.

Rossner got interested in the murder when she wrote an article about it, which was not published, for Esquire magazine. She saw Quinn as one of many lonely young women living in the city.

“It’s astonishing what some women will put up with just to have a warm body,” Rossner said in a 1983 interview with the Washington Post. “Some of the brightest women I know are obsessed with the search. It’s very sad.”

As a novelist, Rossner had a flair for the suspenseful and strange. “August” (1983), her second major bestseller, tells the stories of Dawn Henley and her therapist, Lulu Shinefeld.

The book’s title refers to the summer month when most therapists go on vacation, a dreadful time for Henley, who lives in fear of abandonment. Gradually it becomes clear that Henley’s therapist has a personal story as complicated as her own.

“The unraveling of Dawn’s secrets and the ups and downs of Lulu’s life are as absorbing as a good mystery story,” a Washington Post book reviewer wrote in 1983.

Rossner wrote most of “August” in a loft space in Greenwich Village called The Writers Room, a collective space where she was a member.

“Judy was one of a kind,” said Donna Brodie, executive director of the collective and a longtime friend of Rossner. “She wrote in the tradition of the psychological novel. She had great insight into human behavior and was a born storyteller.”

Film critic Andrew Sarris, another friend, said Rossner was a highly social woman who had many friends.

“She was very perceptive, very witty and very sharp, and she wrote the way she was,” Sarris said.

Rossner set a number of her novels in her native New York City, but one of her more popular works, “Emmeline” (1980), is a period piece set in New England. It is based on a story Rossner heard about a woman who worked in a cotton mill in Lowell, Mass., in the mid-1800s.

The novel focuses on a teenage girl who gets pregnant by her boss and gives up her baby boy for adoption.

She later marries a man some years younger than she is who eventually turns out to be her son.

“True story or not, ‘Emmeline’ is a novel with the force of a ballad -- fateful, chorded and daringly imagined,” Newsweek wrote in 1980.

The magazine’s reviewer, Walter Clemons, said that in both “Emmeline” and “Goodbar,” “Rossner’s subject is loneliness, and she portrays it intimately and exactly.”

Born Judith Perelman, she dropped out of City College of New York and married Robert Rossner, a teacher and writer. They had two children.

She worked at office jobs, including a stint in the advertising department at Scientific American magazine, and wrote fiction at night.

It took her five years to finish her first novel, “To The Precipice.”

Divorced twice, she is survived by her third husband, Leff; children Daniel and Jean; three grandchildren; and a sister.