Barbara Walters interviews Barbara Walters

"Perhaps my experience was the price of being first," she writes. "Back in 1976 you could freely attack a woman for wanting to attempt to do a so-called man's job, especially in the holier-than-thou men-only news departments. Many people still believed that women were supposed to know their place -- and stay in it ... Today, that same attitude would not only be politically incorrect, but the backlash would be enormous."

Whatever resentment she still carries about the professional hurdles she faced, Walters saves plenty of recrimination for herself, in chapters about her adopted daughter and her mentally retarded sister, both named Jackie.

Under the J.K. Rowling-esque heading "The Hardest Chapter to Write," Walters delves at least partway into the emotional turmoil she experienced as mother to an unhappy daughter who was unsure whether people liked her because of who she was, or because her mother was Barbara Walters. "I thought my Jackie had a pretty happy childhood," writes Walters. "She doesn't seem to think so." Jackie got involved in drugs, gangs and heaps of trouble before being packed off to a three-year rehabilitation program in the Midwest. Now a happy adult, and reconciled with her mother, Jackie Danforth runs a similar program in Maine.

But Walters cannot stop picking at the scab of what went wrong between them. She asks herself question after question about what she did wrong, each of them an onion-peeler that would make any of her guests shed a tear. "Could I have done more? If I had not been concentrating so much on my own work ... would I have known more?"

The questions about her retarded sister are even harder, since it is Walters' contention that her ambivalent feelings about her sibling are what drove her to become who she is. She loved Jackie, who she surmises might have been diagnosed as autistic and lived a far better life today. But she also hated and resented her "for being different, for making me feel different." Walters' guilt over her relationship with Jackie so propelled her that she considered calling her autobiography "Sister."

"Much of the need I had to prove myself, to achieve, to provide, to protect, can be traced back to my feelings about Jackie," writes Walters, and it is in this confession that readers learn a crucial truth, both about Walters' historic career and about the changes in attitudes about women and work that have been wrought in the decades it spanned. Approaching 80, Walters clearly feels she still needs to pathologize and diagnose her own ambition, to make excuses and explain away her own freakish impulses toward success.

For all of Walters's brassiness, it's an apologetic approach to power, one that will hopefully be unfamiliar to women raised in a world in which we have female news anchors, female executives, and female candidates for president.

As for Clinton, the other "first woman to ..." likely to be on readers' minds as they page through "Audition," Walters has mostly kind words. She describes one of the first times she ever wore pants, rather than a skirt, for an interview, on a trip to the White House during a snowstorm. Walters pulled on snow boots and hauled ass from New York to Washington only to find her subject in pants as well. That's right: Both Clinton's and Walters' big pantsuit debuts occurred on the same day! As the journalist bizarrely notes, "She looked great. Mrs. Clinton is quite small on top but rather large in the hips. The pants flattered her figure, and now one rarely sees Senator Clinton in anything but pants suits." (I somehow skimmed over Walters' thoughts on the breadth of Henry Kissinger's shoulders and his preference for double-breasted jackets.)

Hillary Clinton appears later in the book, as Walters trips down memory lane through Great Interviews Past. Talking to Walters after the publication of "Living History," the former first lady claimed that she'd stayed with her straying husband, despite friends' advice to the contrary, because "your friends won't be there at three in the morning," a recollection that leads one to believe that in Clinton's world, apparently no one but her is ever awake when you need them at 3 in the morning.

Walters' only mention of Barack Obama is a self-deprecating story about how, upon meeting the senator, she asked him to appear on her chat fest "The View." Obama told Walters that he'd already appeared on the show in 2004 to promote his book "Dreams of My Father." "I'm so sorry I wasn't on the program that day," she recalls telling him, to which he responds, "Oh ... but you were." Whoops.

There are a lot of these silly, star-larded, but sometimes astute anecdotes in "Audition," and it's part of what makes the book compulsively entertaining, if ultimately shallow. At one point, she compares knitting enthusiast Monica Lewinsky to Madame Defarge from "A Tale of Two Cities," and asks her, "Are you knitting the names of people you want to destroy?" Lewinsky, whom Walters describes with acidic condescension as "the kind of girl who gives you hugs," doesn't catch the reference. But the passage is a sad reminder of what Walters understood, though Lewinsky may not have, about the impulses of the sharks then circling the former intern.

Walters has a decent sense of humor about herself, and treading gingerly, she even acknowledges the myriad ways in which she, her interviewing style and her distinctive R-less speaking voice have been lampooned by generations of comedians like Gilda Radner (whose Baba Wawa character probably helped seal its inspiration's place in the celebrity firmament) and Johnny Carson, who could not stop jeering at "What kind of a tree would you be?" -- the question she once asked Katharine Hepburn in an interview. Walters insists defensively that it was Hepburn who first compared herself to a tree.

The parts of Walters' memoir that have already generated the most ink -- and will undoubtedly eat up the most television time (Walters is scheduled to appear on "Oprah" on Tuesday to discuss her book) -- are the personal revelations about her dating life, specifically about the affair with Brooke. Walters also lingers sparingly, and unemotionally, on her marriages, and on relationships with other big-name men like John Warner and Alan Greenspan, whom she used to confuse with another concurrent boyfriend, Alan Greenberg. Hilariously, Walters also writes that Greenspan pushed her to read "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand's Objectivist classics for aspiring fascists (Walters claims that the books had no effect on her save the wish that her parents had named her after Rand's heroine, Dagny.)

Surely the finest and most revealing moment in "Audition" comes near the end, when Walters describes being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, for O magazine, on the occasion of her retirement from "20/20." Oprah asks her what it "means" to be Barbara Walters, a question that may exceed even the high Walters-ian bar for pop-psych pseudo-depth. Walters responds that she's not sure. "I realize how blessed I have been but sometimes I still feel inadequate," she tells Oprah. "I don't cook. I can't drive. Most of the time, when I look back on what I've done, I think: Did I do that? Why didn't I enjoy it more? Was I working too hard to see?"

As Walters reports in her book, "I looked up at Oprah and saw that she had tears in her eyes." And there it is, the meaning of Barbara Walters. She can even make her interviewer cry.

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