GIRLS ONLY, by Alex Witchel; Random House; $23.
If Alex Witchel talks like she writes in "Girls Only," a medical journal should write her up for her ability to live without oxygen.While her stream-of-consciousness writing style might work in her New York Times columns, it is so overwhelming in a book that the reader feels the urge to scream "Breathe!" every few pages.
Yet when Witchel stops trying to be Dave Barry, master of the random thought, and simply tells a story, the result can be poignant and charming.
"Girls Only" attempts to be a "soul-searching and shopping spree" look at Witchel's relationship with her mother, Barbara, and her younger sister, Phoebe. There are also two brothers, a father, a husband and two stepsons, but they don't dare trespass into this superficial turf of pedicures and petty problems.
It's hard to connect with Witchel's world, growing up privileged and pretty in Scarsdale, N.Y., where traumas are taken care of with tuna and a snuggle on the "green couch." Only in a bitter, bitter rant about choosing to be childless amidst pressures from family and friends does Witchel let readers past the reporter's door of the perceived and into the land of the feeling.
"And now that every woman I know wants to ditch nine-to-five to learn the alphabet from scratch, I just shrug. Done that, been there," she writes. "I was actually under the impression, now that everyone else had grown up, I might get to be the child for a change and explore what interests me. There's a concept. Do what I want to do instead of what I'm supposed to do."
Witchel gripes a lot about being the eldest and having to mommy her siblings as well as her own mother. In countless anecdotes, she describes efforts to please her mother with sleepovers at luxury hotels (paid for by The Times), museum trips and a visit to the Statue of Liberty.
But while Witchel enjoys showing off as the successful daughter - she bars her sister from the sleepovers, so there! - she also seems to resent having to go to such effort.
It is Witchel's few start-to-finish stories about her mother that keep the reader from tossing the book in complete frustration. A tale about Barbara's trip to Margaret Mead's exhibit at the Museum of Natural History allows readers to appreciate the elder Witchel's pain at being banned from a world of science as a female student in the late 1940s - and helps explain her daughter's insatiable need to make momma happy.
Unfortunately, Witchel zooms back to the great debate of Bloomingdale's vs. Bergdorf's, leaving readers with a tease of tuna and gasping for something concrete to breathe.