Whenever a new essay by Katie Roiphe is published, I make haste to read it. I am invariably in for a good twenty minutes of fun. That is, I have fun in tracking how she will take a position that I essentially agree with, and overanalyze it, over-focus on it, over-decorate it with half-digestested statistics and generally make it unpalatable to me, until I find myself wanting to disagree with her out of pure contrariness.

Let's take, for instance, the first essay in the book "The great escape". Ms. Roiphe's point seems to be that she's doing just fine, thank you very much, as she's getting a divorce. Well, good for her. I certainly agree that if a woman is getting out of a bad marriage, there is no reason why she should be prostrated with grief. But Ms. Roiphe complains about her friends' concern for her emotional wellbeing at such lengths that one starts to feel that the lady protests too much. And her inference, that the people who seem to insist most on her being miserable are the ones who are trapped in unhappy marriages, simply sounds defensive.

In her essay on children born out of wedlock, she seems to think that the fact that she had a "love child" makes her some type of social outcast. I have a hard time believing that this is how single mothers are viewed in New York city - not exactly the Bible Belt -and I read the rest of the essay thinking "Yes, but what is her POINT ?".

Some of the essays are just plain uninteresting. Her travelogue about a trip to Vietnam, with the obligatory analysis of sex tourism, was a yawn. So was the mini-memoir about how she once slept with the pseudo-boyfriend of a friend of hers, thereby breaking up the friendship. I couldn't figure out why she was friends with the girl, why she slept with the boyfriend, and why this was worth writing about. Then there was a piece about how celebrity profiles in supermarket tabloids all use the same vocabulary and concepts. Really? No one had noticed that before?

The pieces that I enjoyed most, were the ones about literary analysis. And that is probably because I know little about that, and therefore had no opinion at all about what she wrote.

In summary, if you can deal with Ms. Roiphe's affectations, and her pretension that her personal experience is somehow representative of that of all women of "her generation" (a frequently used phrase in her essays), you can have some fun with this book. Otherwise, read Katha Pullitt.