1913–1983 · American journalist, magazine editor and aphorist
Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) was an American journalist who spent her career inside the mid-century magazine world — writing short stories for Redbook and Cosmopolitan, working at Vogue, and serving as copy editor and then managing editor of Glamour before retiring in 1973. Beginning in the 1950s she published the terse, mordant aphorisms that were later gathered into three collections known as the Neurotic’s Notebook books. Her epigrams travel far better than her name does: several of her best-known lines now circulate under more famous bylines, and this is one of them.