Book Review: Readings

Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants

by Jill Soloway

Free Press, 272 pp., $21.95

Jill Soloway's Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants is shameless, and I mostly mean this in the good sense. The book is, nominally, a memoir. In truth, it is more a loose collection of stories, a mix of humorous anecdotes, light social commentary, and the occasional Hallmark-worthy moment. Soloway takes no pains to appear politically correct or ponderously deep in talking about her life, which can be very refreshing. She makes it clear that she doesn't take herself terribly seriously, but at times she laughs at herself a bit too hard.

Soloway's accounts of her childhood experience at camp ("Coming Home (early)") and her 'tweenhood groupiedom ("Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants") are highlights. It's hard not to crack a smile when she admits she followed the Cars' Ben Orr out of his hotel because her friend had already laid claim to Elliot Easton. "Why Do Jews Go to the Bathroom With the Door Open?" is the good kind of shameless: a somewhat graphic account of her bathroom habits, with scatological humor we can all relate to but would rarely talk about publicly, especially in writing. That chapter's title was originally the book's, which brings us to the bad kind of shameless.

The story "Black Was Beautiful" is about Soloway's growing up Jewish in a 98% African-American school. The very fact that Soloway begins the chapter with the line "Here's the holocaust chapter I promised you" is an appropriately red flag, especially when one realizes the chapter has nothing to do with the Holocaust at all. In discussing the good experience she had as a minority in a community of minorities, Soloway winds up, eerily, explaining what black people are like. Her observations are oddly field-note-like, as if she is describing a Malaysian tribe to someone who's never left Hoboken. The worst moment is when she mentions that she tried pork rinds in order to make black people like her (an odd enough idea on its own) but spit them out, because "like gefilte fish, there's something chemical that only works for the group for whom it was created." At times – perhaps too many times – it seems as if Soloway thinks that her oft-mentioned "Jewishness" absolves her of any responsibility to quash stereotypes. Even Soloway's discussion of her own, secular Judaism veers into uncomfortable overgeneralizations and a field-guide feel, hence the bizarre idea that no goyim has ever peed with the door open or, much worse, Soloway's hypothesis that Jews have more sex because "our genes are still in shock over the slaughter of half of our legacy, the code from our cell memory compels us to make more of us, as quickly as possible." Huh? It's unclear whether it's an overambitious theory or an unfunny joke, and either way, it should have been a red-pen moment for her editor.

It's a shame, because Soloway's writing can be truly charming at times. The best parts of Tiny Ladies could make successful magazine pieces, or perhaps a more cohesive book a ways down the road. For now, though, it's very difficult to read Tiny Ladies for its best moments without noticing the chaff in between.