Jean Stein, author and editor, took her own life earlier this week when she leapt from the balcony of her Upper East Side apartment. Friends described her as depressed. She was 83, and leaves behind her two daughters, Wendy vanden Heuvel, an actress and producer, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation magazine.

I worked for Jean in the early 1990s at Grand Street, a literary magazine that she purchased from its founding editor Ben Sonnenberg in 1990. She’d worked previously at the Paris Review, under George Plimpton, who would later edit Jean’s most famous book, Edie: American Girl. It was my brief tenure with Jean that taught me F. Scott Fitzgerald was exactly right—the very rich are different from you and me.