INTRODUCTION

      Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.

      —Edna St. Vincent Millay

      One-size-fits-all usually doesn't—a rule that applies equally to pantyhose and pertinent advice. And why, indeed, should it, given the teeming multitude of female forms, the panoply of human psyches? Of course, if you find it impossible to squeeze 60 percent of your body mass into a miniscule bit of fragile, “flesh”-colored nylon tubing, it is probable that you will lead an interesting and useful life nonetheless. Queen Elizabeth I, after all, never heard of Queen Size. Madam Curie didn't know from Control Top. Isadora Duncan managed to turn modern dance on its head without ever purchasing a single garment labeled “Nude, Size B.”

      Likewise, we can all survive just fine without any more one-size-fits-all advice of the “horizontal stripes make the midriff appear massive,” and “never let a strange man have his way with you” ilk. As for the first statement, wouldn't that mondo midriff actually be an asset in fending off amorous attentions? And as for the second, as feminist author Robin Morgan once noted, “All men are strange.” Zero population growth is all well and good—but do you really want it to start with you?

      This, however, is not your mother's advice. Ten to one, Mama never mentioned that some women are only interested in one thing. (To wit, the actress Valerie Perrine, quoted herein: “I don't care what a man thinks of me as long as I get what I want from him—which is usually sex.”) Unlike comic Roseanne Barr, your mother probably also failed to point out the positive side of PMS: “I think of it as the only time of the month when I can be myself.” And unless your maternal progenitor was the essayist Amy Krouse Rosenthal, she almost certainly never urged you to polish off that second slab of pie, cooing that “Nobody's last words have ever been, ‘I wish I had eaten more rice cakes.’”

      From sex to motherhood (not, incidentally, unrelated phenomena), from physical appearance to self-esteem, from coping with a career to attaining wisdom, the dozens of Wild Women in this collection offer their own brash brand of counsel and commentary on themes common to most women's lives. Unlike those pesky pantyhose, the following tips and quips will do absolutely nothing to flatten your tummy. But surely they will lift your spirits.