TINY LADIES IN SHINY PANTS
By JILL SOLOWAY

Free Press, 2006
ISBN: 0743272188
272 pages, paperback
GENRE(S): Non-fiction, Memoir, Humor, Feminism

Reviewed by Marie Mundaca

Jill Soloway gains a tremendous amount of hipster cred from the advance praise on the back of this book's hardcover edition. Glowing reviews from Jonathan Ames, Neal Pollack, Aimee Bender, and my favorite former late-night sidekick Andy Richter pretty much makes her a contender to win the 2007 award for "This Year's David Sedaris." But perhaps they're all just sucking up to her because she has TV connections-Soloway was a writer and producer on HBO's "Six Feet Under."

I approached this book of humorous personal essays looking for reasons to hate it. After all, Soloway is a cute, successful, funny woman of a certain age (mine), and that automatically rankles me. I'm cute and funny; why am I not writing for television? Her statutory rape story involves a 36-year-old man with a Porsche—mine has a 30-year-old man with a broken van who lived with his mom.

And yet, she won me over almost immediately with her confused rant about feminism. Women raised in the 70s pretty much have the same refrain running through their heads: the theme from the cheap drug-store parfum Enjoli, which declared an Enjoli woman could "bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never ever let you forget you're a man." Soloway doesn't mention Enjoli by name (as Elizabeth Wurtzel did a few years back in Bitch), but she alludes to the gender confusion brought about by the new 70s–80s feminism—are we one of the guys or "hoors"? Do we have the time or the desire to be both? Unlike Wurtzel, or many other third-wave feminist writers, Soloway writes about this confusion not with anger (well, maybe a little anger) but with humor.

Besides the above-mentioned statutory rape story, Soloway regales us with tales of star-stalking, summer camp, and micturating. Soloway has a real talent for taking her personal experiences and obsessions and showing how they relate to the current American ethos. Boring sex at 18 leads her to ruminate on what happened between Kobe Bryant and his accuser in his rape trial; a childhood love of watching televised beauty pageants becomes a treatise on our star-fixated culture.

Soloway's writing can be messy. Her essay equating pledging a sorority with Monica Lewinsky's and Chandra Levy's political sexual relationships didn't go far enough into exploring the illusion of sex equaling power Additionally, the invocation of 1986 New York City rape victim Jennifer Levin in this essay makes little sense, as she did not sleep with a politician. Some of Soloway's gender-political theories are bizarre, especially the assertion that men are historically jealous of women menstruating, hence the subjugation of women. Lastly, her copious use of the phrase "I love me some [nouns]" gets tiresome.

But perhaps it just feels good to have a funny female voice reiterating things we all (well, half of us) think about. There are enough David Sedarises and Augusten Burroughses in the world. Does every humorous memoir writer have to be a gay man from a dysfunctional family? Her take on things isn't necessarily new or original, but she's funny and entertaining, and sometimes that's all we need.

(March, 2007)