PUBLIC CONFESSIONS OF A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN

This collection of monthly magazine columns by Sue Townsend, author of the Adrian Mole books, is (she claims) as close to a memoir as we are going to have from her. Each piece is light as foam, and not meant to last a great deal longer, and yet her accounts of her travels, her frustrations with 29 drafts of various screenplays, her travails as a smoker in a nonsmoking world, her struggle through a snowstorm to meet a newborn grandchild are tart, lighthearted, and charming, and there are worse things in a wicked world. Carolyn Oldershaw reads with exactly the right wry feel for the ridiculous. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/JUL 03]