Selected essays previously published in various periodicals and journals.

Stardust and ashes. The fame lunches ; Platinum pain (Marilyn Monroe) ; Locked in the playground (Michael Jackson) ; Gidget doesn't live here anymore (Sandra Dee) ; The mystery of Dr. B (Bruno Bettelheim) ; Hunting Diana (Princess Diana) ; The peaceful pugilist (Mike Tyson) ; In warm blood (Truman Capote) ; Endless love (Courtney Love) ; Days of brilliant clarity (Richard Burton) -- Skin-deep. Against lip gloss or, New notes on camp ; In my head I'm always thin ; The Yom Kippur pedicure ; The unbearable obsolescence of girdles ; Brace yourself ; Android beauty -- Out of print. Freud without tears (Adam Phillips) ; Bloomsbury becomes me (Lytton Strachey) ; The loose, drifting material of life (Virginia Woolf) ; Moping on the moors (The Bront�� sisters) ; The lady vanquished (Jean Rhys) ; Last tango (Anne Carson) ; Dust-to-dustness (W.G. Sebald) ; Portrait of the artist as a fiasco (Henry Roth) ; A tip of the hat (John Updike) -- Higher values. When a bag is not just a bag ; A fashionable mind ; Our money, ourselves ; Let the fur fly ; Marketing mysticism -- Women in the singular. An independent woman (Liv Ullmann) ; Sleeping alone (Diane Keaton) ; What the camera sees in her (Cate Blanchett) ; A thorny Irish rose (Nuala O'Faolain) ; Illuminating the ordinary (Alice Munro) ; That British dame (Margaret Drabble) ; Sister act (Betty Friedan) -- The mating game. Life on a dare (Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald) ; On not learning to flirt ; Glass house (J.D. Salinger and Joyce Maynard) ; So not a fag hag ; A matched pair (Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath) ; The consolations of thread count ; Can this divorce be saved? ; Brilliant monsters (V.S. Naipaul) ; Do I own you now?