Color Your Hair Red: A Story of One Woman's Liberation

Doge, a professional singer and musician, extrapolates from her own experience to comment on all women, sometimes making gigantic missteps and other times cruising along on brutal honesty, as when she describes the pain of childbirth with considerable gusto. Her observations are meant to have female readers nodding in soulful recognition, but just as often they provoke tired shrugs, echoing as they do 25 years or so of more scholarly feminist thought and even the occasional stand-up comic. Structurally, this is a mess. It darts all over the place, practically daring the reader to find the good bits among the chaff. Weaving through the story with no regularity or reason is Stella, a flamboyant, more assured alter ego who bravely faces men down (when a lover insists, ``I couldn't ever rape you, baby,'' Stella responds, ``Baby, you just did.''). Doge uses the phrase the love of women often, but she is clearly referring to women supporting each other in their relationships with men (``Only women really understand other women's problems with men''). Same-sex lovers tend to occupy either funny anecdotes (the friend whose husband insisted that she see a masseuse for her back problem because he didn't want a strange man touching her, only to have the two women fall in love) or a sort of hazy, idealized fantasy world. This presents the same thrill and the same problems as reading someone's journal: it is unpolished and often pretentious, but it is also intensely private and forthright. (Aug.)