Maybe it's me On being the wrong kind of woman

Novelist Pollack (The Only Woman in the Room) delivers an insightful gaggle of essays about her life, largely through the lens of being an American Jewish woman. With wry intellect, she reflects on coming of age in New York's "Borscht Belt" in the 1960s with her "soulmate," a parakeet named Ish Kabibble; wistfully mourns the summer waitressing job where, at 16, she learned more about herself than what went into Howard Johnson's "lumpy" milkshakes; explores such universal dilemmas as dating via apps as an adult ("If you tell me you are six feet tall, and when you show up you are five foot two, you know what I am going to think you are? A liar"); and ruefully laments the harsh realities of growing older ("Here is what it is like to be in your sixties. You lie in bed wondering if anyone will ever see your breasts again"). Together these essays underscore Pollack's knack for wringing humor from the mundane, successfully striking at the paradoxical ways in which "sex and birth (and love) can be beautiful as well as ugly, wondrous as well as painful, enticing and mysterious as well as frightening and repulsive." This is a hoot. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Union Literary. (Jan.)

A master of the long-form personal essay discourses on a variety of subjects. Novelist, physicist, and writing professor Pollack serves up 16 essays, some previously published in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, New England Review, and other literary journals, digging deep into memoir material and other topics of interest to her. Among others, these include whether the shah of Iran could possibly be Jewish, as a friend of her family claimed, and a critical dissection of an antiquated sex education book she was given as a child. "The hideous black-and-white diagram of 'the mother's reproductive system' resembled a disapproving, big-nosed secretary in hideous cat's eye glasses, while the map of 'the father's reproductive system' reminded me of an evil alien with testicles for eyes and a penis and foreskin for the nose," she writes. The author's candor, curiosity, humor, and gift for phrasemaking are engaging regardless of the topic, many of which are misfortunes of varying severity. Pollack's childhood was largely unhappy, as she was singled out in school for both her intelligence and her orneriness, but many of her classmates, it turns out, suffered much worse. Later in life, she was "peed on, shot at, and kidnapped"--all in one summer. After her marriage, which produced her lovely son ("I Tried To Raise a Jew and He Turned Out a Communist"), she had little luck with men. There was the "Righteous Gentile"--"When I told my mother I was dating a Polish Catholic, the abyss that opened in our conversation was so deep and dark I could see three generations of our family tumble into it"--followed by a slew of lesser men, documented in the title essay, aptly subtitled "The One Woman Show I'll Never Perform in Public." Why not? At almost 30 pages, it's ripe for a comedy special. Yet more compelling work from a unique mind. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.