LIPSHTICK

A candid, often clich‚d, but always comic frolic revealing the inner life of girls, dates, brides, wives and mothers.

This is Macsai's virgin book, but she's been around the block as an award-winning NPR radio writer and producer. A taste of her wit and scope is seen in chapter headings: "The Blunder Years," "The Ova Office," "Vanity Hair," "Love and Hisses," "Till Death Do Us Part (At Least 50% of the Time)," and "From Here to Maternity." While the recollections of anxious adolescence are evocative and genuine, they echo familiar teen TV series and movies. Saving this farrago from mediocrity are perceptive observations, for instance, about the moment "when the music of AM radio starts to replace the blood in your veins and you could never hear it again without being physically moved." Macsai is too eager a victim of men to be a feminist, but she extols the value of girlfriends and prefers "girl crushes" to "boy crushes" for their lifelong loyalty. Especially when it comes to her love of flings ("all the thrill of an affair without the home wrecking"), the author can embarrass us with her lack of self-respect. Like a female Woody Allen, she turns her neuroses into entertainment: "What could be more exciting than the adorable way he never calls you back?" Somehow, this Jewish girl looking for that prime catch or bad-boy fling finds herself dating a fanatic who thanks Jesus for a great cup of coffee. Her self-deprecating humor gets better with age, when it involves fighting weight gain and drooping breasts and tolerating husbands’ bellyaching and babies’ spitting up. Children are the last and largest item on Macsai's list of things that test female stoicism by passing through the vagina—after menstrual blood, swabs, yeast, medication, fingers, penises, and birth-control devices. Can we talk? An irresistible invitation from the Nineties successor to Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers. (Cosmopolitan Book

Club; author tour)