Now Isn't THAT the Truth?

By MARGARET CARLSON

If you like cloying affectation masquerading as insight, then you will enjoy the much hyped Bridget Jones's Diary. The alter ego of London journalist Helen Fielding, Bridget is a bundle of frail funk, preoccupied by short skirts, long nails and yo-yo dieting. She has mother issues, toxic-married-men issues, smoking issues and VCR-programming issues. She affects irony, so you know she is deadly serious about her postfeminist problems--find a gym, find a guy, find a low-cal chocolate. If only she would find a life. And a brain.

Rather than with Bridget, curl up with Nuala O'Faolain (Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman) and Julia Scully (Outside Passages), who elicit a hundred now-isn't-that-the-truth moments. O'Faolain, a celebrated columnist at the Irish Times, is more than a female Frank McCourt. While she's no slouch at depicting old-sod poverty--sleeping with a scrap of sheet to keep her father's overcoat from scratching her chin and dreaming of a place to hang her ragged clothes--her real strength is in her close-to-the-bone rendering of the sadness lurking at the edges of every adult life. She understands how the most contented of us can still be overwhelmed unexpectedly by regret for the life not led. She's had torrid affairs but lacks "one single friend from all that ardour." She wishes she had been able to satisfy the longing "that exists in the head and the heart as well as the body," rather than finding herself utterly alone in her 50s, her sexuality fading, a silhouette in danger of becoming a "character." She didn't want to end up unhappy like her overwhelmed mother: married to a charming, philandering journalist who "didn't even take the cigarette out of his mouth" to bestow a kiss, who forgot the name of the youngest of his nine children, who "dumbly refused the ordinary effort of being a father." So she ended up unhappy in a different way, having to look away when she sees "small children, hopping around...too beautiful to bear."

While Bridget spends the holidays trashing the Smug Marrieds who are giving a party, O'Faolain spends her Christmas walking and reading alone and envying the married friends she visits, "laughing and talking in bed...and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other. What happened to me?" she asks, and answers.

Like O'Faolain, Julia Scully uses the memoir to reveal yourself to you. The primer begins in the emotional void of a San Francisco orphanage where Scully ends up after her father's suicide. By the time she rejoins her hapless mother for a make-do life in a makeshift roadhouse in godforsaken Alaska, "the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke" is perfume to her, the rough miners princes. She works like a dog and builds an inner structure that gets her to Stanford and then to New York City, where she becomes a successful editor.

For those of us who obsess over the perfect school and the perfect camp, this is a simple reminder of the immense power of a child's love, which can last through terrible neglect. So Nuala, pull up a beach chair; you too, Julia. (Bridget? Let's do lunch sometime. How's never? Never's good for me.)