You'll grow out of it

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN a personal essay and a confessional essay can be tricky to spot. The personal essay - the more exalted form of the two - can be as dense and layered as a short story; it fancies itself a prism and uses the personal to shed light on the communal. The patron saint of the personal essay is Joan Didion. The telltale signs of the confessional essay include a warm, pseudo-confiding tone and a penchant for lists and adverbs like "humiliatingly" and "embarrassingly." The patron saint of this brisk subgenre of the form is Nora Ephron. One is not higher art than the other, but now that numerous writers have entered into a symbiotic relationship with the internet - trading personal revelations for page views - the confessional essay has lost some of its dignity. Too many invite only rubbernecking; the source of their power is their graphic or shocking revelations. Then a book like Jessi Klein's "You'll Grow Out of It" comes along to remind us just what an artful confessional essay can do. A stand-up comedian and former writer for "Saturday Night Live," Klein is currently the head writer and executive producer of "Inside Amy Schumer." In these 24 short pieces, her irreverent and inventive brand of humor almost seamlessly transfers to essay form. Riffs on dating, aging, marriage, infertility and childbirth have the zing-and-run rhythm of sketch comedy, but structured for the page. Many of the essays hinge on gender. Klein introduces herself as a "tom man" ("what happens when a tomboy just never grows out of it") baffled by the rites of womanhood: The Victoria's Secret catalog makes her feel as if she "should be disqualified from being considered a female" and the store itself is like "walking into someone else's vagina" It is mystifying to her that one could be skilled at being one's own gender, and she balks at the fact that so many of femininity's dictates "involve shrinking rather than growing." (This obviously does not stop her wishing she looked like Amélie, attending barre workout classes or obsessing over her wedding dress.) These pieces often have a let-me-level-with-you directness reminiscent of Ephron without being too imitative (Ephron loved herself a good bath, Klein sees it as "where you go when you run out of options"). Meanwhile, the marks of a comedy sketch writer are everywhere, including such quips as "Every Anthropologie store feels like the manger in which Zooey Deschanel was born" and "Ma'am sounds like a woman whose body is mostly cheese whiz." One of the higher echelons of praise for confessional essays is that they mimic the experience of listening to your best friend. Klein's read as if you're texting with her and have been for your whole life. The jokiness, digressions, confessions and punctuation in lieu of words (!!!) are counterbalanced by thoughtful insights and genuine emotion, as when she is advised to stop putting up with a narcissistic boyfriend who describes himself as a "wounded bird." "Take care of your own bird," her friend tells her. Even low-hanging fruit like "The Bachelor" provokes interesting observations as Klein fantasizes, in detail, about an alternate dating show for "Jewish girls with glasses who went to liberal arts colleges." She also delivers in the feminism department. From her essay on baths: "This is why Virginia Woolf stressed the importance of having a room of one's own. If you don't fight for it, don't insist on it and don't sacrifice for it, you might end up in that increasingly tepid water, pruning and sweating while you dream of other things." On society's praise of women who forgo epidurals: "It's interesting that no one cares very much about women doing anything 'naturally' until it involves them being in excruciating pain." And her prose is pungent throughout: A beautiful woman on a subway car makes her feel like "a Ziploc bag filled with old shrimp." THIS IS A BOOK about accepting one's flaws, and it's not without a few of them. The deeper the topic - heartbreak, marriage, career struggles - the more monotonous the telling. Klein is sharpest when riffing rather than recounting, and efforts to combine the two do not always go smoothly. The other issue is that too many essays end on a note of pat summary: "I remember feeling that lingerie is really never worth the agita"; "What I learned is that this is often the way men and women decide to get engaged." These attempts to wrap it up feel surprisingly incomplete, almost as if there's a paragraph missing, and they put otherwise nuanced essays in danger of having little point beyond : Being a lady, amirite? But then another essay begins and the danger passes. By the end of the book, Klein, like Ephron, makes some pretty rarefied topics seem relatable, including winning an Emmy, getting back-to-back massages and checking into the Post Ranch Inn with her future husband. Of the starlets at the Emmys ("those perfectly poised palomino ladies") she writes, "It's not so much that I want to look the way they look as that I want to feel the way I imagine looking that way feels." She may have hit upon the Everywoman's version of Kate Moss's "Nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels." And after reading "You'll Grow Out of It," anyone would rather be text buddies with Jessi Klein than Kate Moss - which is the kind of praise only a grown woman will appreciate. Riffs on dating, aging, marriage and infertility, with the rhythm of sketch comedy. SLOANE CROSLEY is the author of two books of essays and the novel "The Clasp."