Introduction: Travels at My Desk

I. STARDUST AND ASHES
The Fame Lunches
Platinum Pain (Marilyn Monroe)
Locked in the Playground (Michael Jackson)
Gidget Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Sandra Dee)
The Mystery of Dr. B. (Bruno Bettelheim)
Hunting Diana (Princess Diana)
The Peaceful Pugilist (Mike Tyson)
In Warm Blood (Truman Capote)
Endless Love (Courtney Love)
Days of Brilliant Clarity (Richard Burton)

I I. SKIN- DEEP
Against Lip Gloss or, New Notes on Camp
In My Head I'm Always Thin
The Yom Kippur Pedicure
The Unbearable Obsolescence of Girdles
Brace Yourself
Android Beauty

I I I. OUT OF PRINT
Freud Without Tears (Adam Phillips)
Bloomsbury Becomes Me (Lytton Strachey)
The Loose, Drifting Material of Life (Virginia Woolf)
Moping on the Moors (The Brontë Sisters)
The Lady Vanquished (Jean Rhys)
Last Tango (Anne Carson)
Dust- to- Dustness (W. G. Sebald)
Portrait of the Artist as a Fiasco (Henry Roth)
A Tip of the Hat (John Updike)

IV. HIGHER VALUES
When a Bag Is Not Just a Bag
A Fashionable Mind
Our Money, Ourselves
Let the Fur Fly
Marketing Mysticism

V. WOMEN IN THE SINGULAR
An In de pen dent Woman (Liv Ullmann)
Sleeping Alone (Diane Keaton)
What the Camera Sees in Her (Cate Blanchett)
A Thorny Irish Rose (Nuala O'Faolain)
Illuminating the Ordinary (Alice Munro)
That British Dame (Margaret Drabble)
Sister Act (Betty Friedan)

VI . THE MATING GAME
Life on a Dare (Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
On Not Learning to Flirt
Glass House (J. D. Salinger and Joyce Maynard)
So Not a Fag Hag
A Matched Pair (Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath)
The Consolations of Thread Count
Can This Divorce Be Saved?
Brilliant Monsters (V. S. Naipaul)
Do I Own You Now?

Acknowledgments