Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women.

By Elizabeth Wurtzel. New York: Doubleday. 434 pp, $23.95.

Kim France

A couple of years ago, motivated primarily by boredom, I decided to get a tattoo. I dropped into one of my neighborhood body-adornment shops and flipped through the flash books looking for a suitable design with which to brand myself for life. When I saw the Chinese characters for the phrase "bad girl," I became enchanted, convinced I'd found the perfect one. But then I remembered that not only was I not a bad girl, I was such a good girl that I was not going to get a bad girl tattoo, or any tattoo at all.

I was reminded of this episode while reading Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, because it seems obvious that its author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, is - underneath that tortured-artist babe persona - a class-A good girl. She is, in fact, Maureen Dowd with an eyebrow ring, a legendary overachiever since her Harvard days. Wurtzel won the Rolling Stone college journalism contest, enjoyed paid summer internships at big city papers, did all the right apple-polishing to ensure a nice job in journalism upon graduation. She published her first book while still in her twenties and was the rock critic for the New Yorker, for crying out loud. Even the faux-risque cover of Bitch is about as naughty (can you spot the nipple?) as a topless Barbie.

One gets the impression, while reading this peculiar book, that Wurtzel's inability to achieve true badness has been one of the central disappointments of her life, and that her only consolation has been her ability to get people talking about her. "It would not surprise me at all to discover that Eve started the whole mess with the serpent and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and Original Sin just to get attention," she writes, and it does not surprise the reader that this does not surprise her.

What is most frustrating about Bitch is that it could have been good. The topic, after all, is quite rich, and the basic premise that "the world does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep" is certainly engaging, if not exactly new. But while Wurtzel is no dummy, she is also a wildly undisciplined thinker. Trying to follow the logic in this book is like attempting to predict the path of a tornado: she flits from one half-constructed argument to another, then back to her original point, sprinkling in off-kilter opinions as though they were widely acknowledged facts ("The power you have as a girl at eleven is to make men uncomfortable," she writes, "it is not yet to make them feel good." Say what?) before skittering on to the next topic. She will be on the verge of making a potentially interesting connection only to drop the topic a second later. You want to take her by the shoulders, as you would a hyperactive five-year-old who keeps putting the square peg in the round hole, and tell her to take a deep breath.

Wurtzel is also fatuously self-involved, and many are the moments that the reader is given more information than necessary about her life, loves, and dark nights of the soul. In the epilogue, which is Wurtzel's attempt to convince the reader that she's too dang bad to the bone to ever get married and settle down, we get a simultaneously outrageous and utterly mundane recitation of everything she was too busy doing in her twenties to bother finding a husband. However, my life is no richer for knowing that Wurtzel fucked her tattoo artist on the floor of his shop ("just to make sure that the Penthouse 'Forum' isn't all lies"). And why on God's green earth does she think we care that she often whiles away the hours going through the sale racks at Barneys?

Wurtzel told Newsweek that she wrote Bitch in a drug-fueled haze and after turning it in proceeded directly to rehab. This is, to my mind, sad and revealing information. Desperate to draw a direct line between herself and such dark geniuses as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Courtney Love, she succeeds only in getting the dark part right. The image of her all torqued up on various substances, thinking that she is creating some gut-wrenching, genre-defining masterpiece is, in light of the weird and confused tract she actually has created, nothing short of heartbreaking.

Kim France is an editor-at-large at Spin.