Introduction: Travels at My Desk ix
I Stardust and Ashes
The Fame Lunches 3
Platinum Pain (Marilyn Monroe) 10
Locked in the Playground (Michael Jackson) 23
Gidget Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Sandra Dee) 29
The Mystery of Dr. B. (Bruno Bettelheim) 33
Hunting Diana (Princess Diana) 45
The Peaceful Pugilist (Mike Tyson) 55
In Warm Blood (Truman Capote) 68
Endless Love (Courtney Love) 75
Days of Brilliant Clarity (Richard Burton) 86
II Skin-Deep
Against Lip Gloss or, New Notes on Camp 93
In My Head I'm Always Thin 100
The Yom Kippur Pedicure 109
The Unbearable Obsolescence of Girdles 119
Brace Yourself 125
Android Beauty 131
III Out of Print
Freud Without Tears (Adam Phillips) 139
Bloomsbury Becomes Me (Lytton Strachey) 151
The Loose, Drifting Material of Life (Virginia Woolf) 155
Moping on the Moors (The Bronte Sisters) 163
The Lady Vanquished (Jean Rhys) 169
Last Tango (Anne Carson) 174
Dust-to-Dustness (W. G. Sebald) 181
Portrait of the Artist as a Fiasco (Henry Roth) 190
A Tip of the Hat (John Updike) 198
IV Higher Values
When a Bag Is Not Just a Bag 205
A Fashionable Mind 210
Our Money, Ourselves 216
Let the Fur Fly 234
Marketing Mysticsm 240
V Women in the Singular
An Independent Woman (Liv Ullmann) 257
Sleeping Alone (Diane Keaton) 266
What the Camera Sees in Her (Cate Blanchett) 280
A Thorny Irish Rose (Nuala O'Faolain) 287
Illuminating the Ordinary (Alice Munro) 297
That British Dame (Margaret Drabble) 309
Sister Act (Betty Friedan) 322
VI The Mating Game
Life on a Dare (Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald) 335
On Not Learning to Flirt 340
Glass House (J. D. Salinger and Joyce Maynard) 345
So Not a Fag Hag 353
A Matched Par (Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath) 359
The Consolations of Thread Count 364
Can This Divorce Be Saved? 371
Brilliant Monsters (V. S. Naipaul) 385
Do I Own You Now? 393
Acknowledgments 399