A voice like Sedaris, a best-selling book and she knows from tiaras

Friday, January 21, 2005

The mantle has yet to be claimed, but a new contender has stepped forward into the publishing ring.

Publishers' frantic search for "the female David Sedaris," a distaff voice in the wiseass and off-kilter mode, may have finally come to an end this week with Susan Jane Gilman. The New York native's new memoir, "Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress" (Warner Books, 352 pages, $12.95), will debut this Sunday at a lofty No. 8 on The New York Times' paperback best-seller list.

The memoir's surprising debut follows on the high heels of Gilman's previous essay collection, "Kiss My Tiara: How To Rule the World as a Smartmouth Goddess."

"Pouffy" carries an almost as appealing a subtitle -- "Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless" -- and recounts what the author describes as "spectacularly imbecilic behavior" during her misspent youth in New York City and beyond recounted with Gilman's trademark sarcasm.

"Sexually, boys were about as complicated as a Pez dispenser," Gilman writes. "You showed them a nipple, they got an erection. It was Pavlovian, not exactly the stuff of higher primates."

Gilman makes similar sly hay out of her college years, her early work experiences, her world travels, her eventual succumbing to the unexpected allure of wearing a white dress down the aisle with a guy named Bob.

"If I married him in a big, pouffy white dress, he'd appreciate equally the irony and the beauty of it," Gilman writes. "We would stand before our lesbian Wiccan priestess and our highly elastic rabbi, surrounded by our innermost circle of family and friends."

Susan Jane Gilman discusses "Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress" at 7 p.m. Thursday at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, 206-366-3333.

-- John Marshall

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