Although the rough outlines of Winterson's biography follow more or less the same as those sketched above, she has always resisted the idea that "Oranges" should be taken as a literal account of her childhood. "I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about 'experience' -- the compass of what they know -- while men write wide and bold, the big canvas, the experiment with form," she writes in her new book, "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?," released last year in England and published in the United States last week.

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But as a child and teenager, she lived the kind of life that would not have been out of place for a girl born a century before. Williamsburg, Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium was, for some, the epicenter of the post-punk revival, artists lofts, angular haircuts and hipster culture. But Williamsburg is also the long-time home of the Satmar community, a sect of Hasidic Jews that formed two large settlements in Brooklyn and upstate New York shortly after the end of World War II.

Feldman grew up in her grandparents’ brownstone -- her father was mentally ill; her mother was estranged for reasons that don’t become clear until the end of her memoir -- watched over by her grandmother, Bubby, a Holocaust survivor, and her frequently interfering aunt. In her home, there were no secular newspapers, no radios, no television. She saw her first forbidden movie at 17.

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The subject of "Why We Broke Up" -- the unlikely romance between a "jocky" boy and a girl he insists, despite her protests, on calling "arty" -- would sit comfortably next to any classic John Hughes movie. But the execution is a master class in the things books do best: It's loaded with sly, beautifully produced illustrations by Maira Kalman and Handler's exquisitely wrought sentences, brimming with charm and surprise, whether describing invented plots to classic films, clothes coming off a dry-cleaning rack, or the gorgeous banality, beauty and terror of high school life.

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Gaby Rodriguez, the author of the memoir "The Pregnancy Project," soon to be a Lifetime movie of the same name, lives in Toppenish, Wash., population 9,000, 75 percent Latino, with a casino and a discount movie theater where second-run movies cost $3; where 98 percent of the students at her high school qualify for free lunch and teens compete with their parents for jobs at Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and in migrant labor.

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But what is "Teen Mom" really teaching us? And what does its popularity tell us about our current moment? 

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It took a bit longer than two weeks for Monroe's daughter, Marie, to arrive, but once she did, their new family, described in Monroe's new memoir "On the Outskirts of Normal," was so unusual, she felt like a "minority's minority." Although most single adoptive parents are white women, only one percent choose to adopt a black child. This isn't solely a result of white racial discomfort; historically, the National Association of Black Social Workers has been vehemently opposed to transracial adoption. Placing a black child in white families, they have argued, is akin to "cultural genocide"; white parents, they claim, can neither teach black children their heritage, nor train them to live in a racist society.

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Do you remember that media darling, "the 'Juno' Effect"? The theory goes something like this: When impressionable teenagers see any representation of a young, unmarried pregnant woman on the big screen ("Juno," "Knocked Up"), or the small screen ("The O.C.," "16 and Pregnant"), or in a magazine, or on a talk show (Bristol Palin, Jamie Lynn Spears), they somehow lose all ability to evaluate any nuance or context in that woman's particular situation, and instead make some sort of primitive cause-and-effect connection: That woman is in the movies (or on TV, or in a magazine)! That makes her glamorous! Maybe if I get knocked up, I'll be glamorous, too!

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But take heart: No one blames you ladies for this fiasco. See, our pundits seem to have figured out that many of the firms generally held responsible for the economic meltdown, whether by choice or happenstance, weren't particularly keen on hiring women in the first place. And in light of that, some have decided to blame the whole damn mess on the very thing that (allegedly) makes men beat their chests, holler at cute girls in skirts, use the hand rail at the local park in a possibly lethal manner, and lose all their cash to the bookies and the bankers. It's all about the testosterone, you see. And since us girls tend to have an awful lot less of that, we might just be able to save Wall Street. If, you know, they'd let us.

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The revolution — an overtly feminist movement in the punk underground — was already percolating across the country. But these ladies gave it a name: Riot Grrrl. (Jen Smith of Bratmobile came up with the idea of a "girl riot" while Vail added the triple rrrs that made girls roar.)

Like most of their compatriots in the punk underground, the riot grrrls held themselves and each other to high standards of artistic and political purity, which often included a willful distrust and disdain for the mainstream media. (After being caricatured in one too many newsweeklies, members of the riot grrrls actually instituted a "media blackout" in 1992.)

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As Ariel Gore knows, women's happiness is much more complicated than that: She literally wrote the book on the subject. "Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness" takes a probing and nuanced look at the field of happiness studies as they pertain to women. For instance, while some studies show women testing sadder than men, they also test happier than men. But "Bluebird" isn't a statistics-crunching book. It is what Gore calls a "study of living -- an adventure into the feminine history, science and experience of happiness -- intent on discovering the secret of joy."  She read books, both classic and contemporary, attended workshops in positive psychology, and interviewed hundreds of women.

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It’s not cheap. The left-behind parent she chooses to follow, Todd Hopson, a Florida lawyer, pays $25,000 for Zamora to retrieve his nine-year-old son, Andres, from Costa Rica. (And that rate is the recession special!) The ethical issues of responding to an alleged kidnapping with another kidnapping are murky enough. But in her reporting, Labi adds yet another layer of complexity:

Hopson is not Andres’ biological father; Jason Alvarado, a Costa Rican dentist, is. And it’s Alvarado who is the target of the snatchback.

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What one thinks of Pelosi’s steeliness largely depends on whether she’s playing for your team. This is a woman who can send her enemies into apoplectic frenzy. The choicer tidbits cited by Grigoriadis include the insult “Mussolini in a skirt,” and a disturbing number of threats to do bodily harm -- Glenn Beck joked (ha! ha!) that he’d like to poison her wine; Joe the Plumber said he wanted to “beat the living tar out of her” and a radio host once said he wanted to punch her in the face. (Not to be outdone, a New York magazine reader chimes in that he’d like to “throw up in her face and says she is the “Penguin to Obama’s Joker.”)

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