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Ketchup and Convertibles
My stepdaughters insisted on camping with ketchup, Pepsi and showers. I'd rather be opening a bottle of white wine with the women in the red Mustang convertible.
By Karen Ackland
[08/10/99]

Counter spy
I waitressed in the restaurant of nothingness where the menu was a work of fiction. There was no Coke. There was no bleu cheese. There was no dinner salad and there never would be.
By Maria Dolan
[08/06/99]

A cold-blooded killing in the neighborhood
My children believe in tooth fairies. Do I have to tell them about the murder across the street?
By Heather Donovan
[08/05/99]

Take me to a hospital!
What possessed me to think there was something appealing about cleaning up after the birth of my own child?
By Susan Gerhard
[08/04/99]

Give me drugs!
What's so feminist about a painful childbirth?
By Nina Shapiro
[08/03/99]

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272 PAGES

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By Katie Allison Granju

August 11, 1999 | At 35, my friend Spike (nee Jacqueline) Gillespie is only a couple of years older than I. We met more than a decade ago while we were both waitressing in Knoxville, Tenn., at a nightclub called Ella Gurus. For two years, we lived in the same dilapidated neighborhood, ran around with overlapping circles of slacker friends and passed a boyfriend or two back and forth. We both went on to become mothers who write, we share an agent and we even both have sons named Henry -- born within a year of one another. But that's where the similarity ends. Reading her just-released memoir -- "All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy" -- I found myself offering up a silent prayer of thanks for the relatively dull soccer-mom existence that I have lived since Spike and I last resided in the same city. Her first-person account of her own adult life is a harrowing chronicle that includes too much alcohol, a vast array of relationships gone horribly wrong, miscarriage, cancer, intermittent periods of poverty and spells of near-suicidal depression. Yet, as alien as most of her actual experiences are to me, I -- and every other mother I know who has read this book -- found myself identifying very strongly with the tale she has to tell.

As a highly accomplished freelance writer, Spike Gillespie's work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Texas Monthly and other national publications. But it is in the world of online journalism where she has made her greatest mark. Gillespie came online at the urging of writer friends who encouraged her to become "the Madonna of the Infobahn." Immediately seduced by the false intimacy of online communication, Gillespie -- always prone to long, soul-baring personal correspondence and essays -- began writing an e-mail column, soon syndicated worldwide by Prodigy, in which, as one reviewer noted, she "pioneered the art of the online confessional." Her Web work has also appeared in Word, Tripod, Salon and Bust. As her column subscriber numbers grew during the latter half of the '90s, so did her acclaim, leading USA Today to dub her one of the first "cyber-celebrities." In her weekly chronicles of both the ordinary and extraordinary happenings of her life -- everything from the death of her son's guinea pig to the termination of her own pregnancy -- she developed a loyal fan base of readers, mostly women, who follow her to this day. Although Prodigy eventually canceled her column, it was these essays that formed the seed material for her autobiography.

In the book, Gillespie recounts her personal history in an unflinching straight line -- starting with her childhood as the daughter of working-class New Jersey Catholics, moving on to her teenage summers at the gritty, 1970s Atlantic seashore of Bruce Springsteen and finally wrapping up with her current status as one of the arty elite in arty Austin, Texas.

The theme running throughout the entire narrative is the writer's search for the love and attention she never received from her remote, cold father. Unlike so many other modern tales of dysfunctional families, this isn't one of overt abuse. Gillespie wasn't beaten, molested or starved by her parents. Instead she paints a picture of a severe, oddball father -- a man who required that his children peel his sweaty socks off his feet each evening and who drove his brood of eight mortified offspring around town in a huge clunker of a car plastered with crudely hand-lettered pro-life slogans. Gillespie's father was apparently never willing and perhaps unable to demonstrate any love for his child, or to accept the mouthy, tattooed, literary feminista she became.

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