A lot of reviewers have been comparing "The Girls' Guide" to "Bridget Jones's Diary," as well as to a slew of other recently published single-women titles, and the comparison isn't entirely off the mark: Jane is definitely looking for Mr. Right. But what she wants is not just someone to walk down the aisle with but also someone to walk her dog with. From the very first story through to the end -- in which a 30-ish Jane follows a "Rules"-style guide and finds, to her horror, that it actually works -- it's clear that, for her, finding the man is just a piece of the puzzle, not the puzzle itself.

While Jane's constant wisecracks may strike some as knee-jerk or facile, others will recognize them as a sign of strength of spirit. As Jane confesses in one story: "I was shy, so I talked too much." She is desperately -- though not self-deprecatingly -- funny, in a way that suggests a survival instinct that has outlived its adaptive qualities. But it's the helplessness hiding underneath, and Jane's awareness of it, that make her so hilarious and, ultimately, so touching.

Francis Ford Coppola commissioned Bank to write the anti-"Rules" story for his Zoetrope magazine, and he is now adapting the entire collection for a film. Bank, meanwhile, is working on her first full-length novel. She spoke with me in New York, where she lives with her dog, Maybelline.

There's a girl-next-door quality to Jane. There's nothing particularly extraordinary about her -- she doesn't fall into any extraordinary circumstances -- and yet you've managed to create such a memorable character.

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I didn't set out to write an everywoman. I wanted a true character, but I didn't think, "Oh, here's somebody everyone can relate to"; I wasn't thinking about an audience. You get somebody right by getting all of the little tiny things right. Somehow that's how you wind up at anything universal.

Given the confessional nature of so much writing in recent years, it seems like a bold move to have Jane come from what is essentially a loving, functional family.

I think there is a tendency to blame one's parents or to look askance at where you come from. But I really wanted to write something that was realistic to me, and that other kind of voice just didn't belong. For a number of years, I felt a kind of disdain for who I was and what I came from and how I lived. There was a part of me that didn't believe that anything in my life was really worth writing about. I was trying to write about tragedy, poor people, prostitutes -- things I knew nothing about -- because they seemed closer to the bone, even if it wasn't my bones. There were years when I never wrote anything funny. None of my characters made any jokes.

There does seem to be a low threshold for humor from straight women.

You know, for some reason the book was published in France first, and an interviewer faxed me some questions, and one of the questions was: "Of course people always say that a woman who is funny cannot be erotic or seductive. But that's not true in your book. Why isn't it?" Or something like that. And I thought, "Of course people always say this?" I had a boyfriend at the time, and I turned to him and read the question, and he said, "But you're not funny." And I actually wasn't funny with him. The mark of my being in the wrong relationship is that I stop being funny.

But I would argue that nobody can actually be funny and erotic at the same time. They don't really go together. I mean, I hope that I'm erotic. But when you're being erotic, you're creating a spell; when you're making a joke, you're breaking it.

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