How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, by Ann Marlowe (Basic Books, 1999)

also:

The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider (Time Warner, 1995)

CosmoGirl!, Atoosa Rubenstein, editor-in-chief

Swell: A Girl's Guide to the Good Life, by Cynthia Rowley and Ilene Rosenzweig (Warner Books, 1999)

Literature that tells women and girls how to behave: we may deny that we pay attention to it, but we keep reading it. The genre has a seductive effect, knocking you both "alert and unconscious at once," as T.W. Adorno wrote of Los Angeles.

A couple of years ago, as I winced my way through The Rules, I slumped into a disturbingly passive state even as each chapterette convinced me that it had been I who'd wrecked all my previous relationships. It wasn't that I didn't care that I'd never land Mr. Right. I just couldn't follow any of the Rules while I was reading them, and the authors are so persistent, so single-minded, and their Rules sound so convincing, that I figured I was better off just reading and not dating. So I bobbed in the moral turbulence of Rules-land until the next time I saw my therapist. Then I broke Rule 31, Don't Discuss the Rules With Your Therapist.

I mention The Rules because its popularity has created Rules support groups, Rules chat rooms, Rules wedding advisers, Rules dating journals (in which to record your mistakes), and $500-an-hour phone consultations with the authors. Fein and Schneider have nurtured a population of Rules Girls and guaranteed the staying power of the kind of how-to book that tells you how to do it, not your way, but the author's way. The new femme conservatives—the-iron-fist-in-a-Kate-Spade-handbag women—have how-to books disguised as polemics (Return to Modesty, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us); and for the ironic ladies there are how-to books disguised as novels (Bridget Jones's Diary, Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing). But it just doesn't get more misleading or manipulative than The Rules, with which the authors press their icily humanist dogma into you as efficiently as floured fingers crimping a piecrust. Misleading, because even though many of the rules do protect you from self-abasement, you simply can't make people behave the way you want them to. Manipulative, because the authors prompt you again and again to recall all the times you screwed up and got hurt—because you didn't follow the rules. They press where it hurts: right on your relentless hope that people will change, that you'll get the love you want and live happily ever after.

Now consider How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, by Ann Marlowe. Or rather, lest we're tempted to take the book as seriously as the author takes herself, let's consider it alongside CosmoGirl!, edited by Atoosa Rubenstein. The first is a memoir by a former heroin user, a financial analyst turned rock critic; the second is a memoir by a Hearst Corporation employee, disguised as a magazine for teenage girls. When memoirs are bad, like these are, the problem is the same as with stage monologues: there's no relief from the author's insecurity or nervousness or excruciating solipsism. And when the performer or author talks right at you, you cower, exposed to every twitch and shiver that the author feels compelled to explain and analyze. You want relief. You want the second banana.

These bad memoirs are how-to books in disguise, for women who long to be both alert and unconscious, consumers of nothingness. These are The Rules not for how to land a husband, but for how to use heroin to be both vulnerable and daring, or how to use makeup and clothes to be both a man's woman and your own woman. These are, in the end, the deeply flawed how-to's of dodging existential despair.

Ann Marlowe's despair pokes its way in through free time, which makes her anxious, and through fear of the future (old age, death). Heroin filled her down time with a torpor made acceptable by danger. Atoosa Rubenstein's despair, on the other hand, mirrors that of the adolescent girls who read her magazine—except that she's no longer a frizzy-haired, unfashionably ethnic teenager who got a job at Carvel because she couldn't get a date for the prom; now she's 28, photogenically beautiful, and editor-in-chief of one of the year's most successful magazine start-ups. Weirdly conservative for hipsters manquées, Marlowe and Rubenstein lay down a dangerous kind of didacticism. Marlowe's yammering about "the cultural moment" is so persistent and so arid that if you don't listen carefully you might think she's actually got some authority, and you might find yourself taking notes based on her rules, such as doing heroin after running but before tae kwon do class. And Rubenstein just keeps dishing out rules for living la vida Cosmo—"Be yourself!" "Jot down an hour for all-about-me time!" "Use aromatherapy to change a bad mood fast!"—as cheerfully and reliably as she scooped ice cream on what was supposed to be her prom night.

Aside from the obvious and necessary criticism of a magazine full of photos of girls who look like sulky puppies and ads that urge you to "let your feet do the flirting!" there's something devious about CosmoGirl!. It's not just about adolescent sexuality, you see. Atoosa knows from despair and feels responsible for preventing it. She told the New York Observer, "When girls don't look in the mirror and feel bad about themselves, then I'll have done my job." Here's how she gets the job done: she has the girls make the guys feel bad instead. For the May issue's Girl Magnet, Rubenstein ran the comments of 13-year-old Lisa, who said, of a soft-looking skateboarder named Andrew, "He needs khakis, without stains." Sure, the unedited responses on the magazine's Web site—which consist mostly of threats to various Dominican girls to "throw u to da ground"—may reflect readers who are more alert than unconscious, but Rubenstein will probably still get her performance bonus.

Marlowe, who managed seven years of heroin use by keeping strict control over her free time, her drug intake, and her social life, seems to have been equally capable of profiting from her own angst. In other words, she was a big drag. Not that she should have spent those years "whirling around in a blender of sex and booze," as screenwriter Arthur Laurents happily confesses in his recent autobiography, Original Story By. Doing or reading about heroin needn't be a chucklefest, but Marlowe spurns any kind of comfort: furniture, security, safety, health—all too Jewish for this Jew. "I didn't do drugs to prove how non-Jewish I was, but I did them to become a person who in what I imagined as implacable outlaw cool, wasn't in the least like the Jew I was afraid to be taken for." It's this type of nervous-dreamy solipsistic hair-splitting that makes you wish the fourth wall would rise again, taking that last comma with it.

Few things are more nervously dreamy than an adolescent girl. The state makes possible intellectual and physical discovery, risk-taking, and invention. Yet CosmoGirl! and its kin pay too much attention to an accompanying anxiety, feeding girls a sticky, narcotic mix of niceness mixed with hazy, quasi-New Age images drained of meaning. A purse is described as feng shui simply because it's embroidered with an Asian-ish design. Vanilla perfume evokes babyish, kiss-on-the-nose sex the way Love's Baby Soft products did for my generation. (Don't actually be a hippie, just smell like one.) The dreamy-alert adolescent girl is so vulnerable to market pressure that marketers are relentless in their pursuit: "I think the biggest growth opportunity is going to be intimate fashion for overweight kids," an unsmiling trend researcher told Rolling Stone last year.

Most girls depend on their friends to get them through the despair of adolescence, so CosmoGirls play in a tell-all world of giggles and shrieks, with shorthand like L.Y.L.A.S. ("love ya like a sister"), along with more solemn features like "I Was Robbed at Gunpoint." They fess up to farting in front of the hottie lifeguard, or looking at naked pictures of their sister's boyfriend. Real boys give non-answers to questions like "Why can't guys ever be straightforward about how they feel?" ("Guys and girls have a hard time with this. My advice is to just go for it.") Even friendless, unfriendly Ann Marlowe hints at a brittle, not quite credible social life full of cute, raggedy rock boys and thin, beautiful, crazy rich girls. Drama queens every one, they "itch" for fights, play Russian roulette, drink themselves into stupors—and eventually they all disappear. All except for Marlowe, who's always in control. When she isn't smugly evoking Aristotle or embarrassing herself with prattle about "gigging" in the East Village, Marlowe writes with clarity about the paradoxes she created with her addiction, her intellectualism, her poshness, and ultimately her femininity. But this uninterrupted self-examination wears as thin as Marlowe's tall, wacky friends.

Frankly, although addiction might be an interesting way in to a bigger story about despair, the life surrounding Ann Marlowe's addiction doesn't earn the attention. Like people who cut their salmon steak with a knife and a fork, she puts too much effort into dissecting something that flakes pretty easily. Like her fellow heroin memoirist, Alf screenwriter Jerry Stahl, Marlowe strains so hard to be hip that she sucks the life out of her own life. Whether she's describing the fashion of the times as "anything with the logo of a hip product, like motorcycles; or a retro business, like a bowling alley or diner" or explaining that people like rock music because the backbeat "suggests that it is worth lingering in the now," Marlowe's take on culture and her relationship with it sounds like a memo from an executive producer's research assistant.

Exacerbating this problem, in an attempt to add texture to her life, Marlowe structures the book around alphabetized, one-word headings (car, geographical, jewish, reality) and cross-references, as in "I'd never been able to abide a day without a schedule (see busy)." Not unlike their HTML counterpart, these hyperlinks drill down to a fatuously detailed cross-section of Marlowe's shallow existentialism, for example her disdain for material comforts. In the chair entry, she notes that her apartment has two couches but no easy chairs. When she wrote this book, she sat on a folding wooden chair. Know what else? Her answering machine code derives from a Soul Asylum lyric that mentions a chair, her father used to read in a comfortable chair, and the family room also contained a couch, a table, and an easy chair. Marlowe insists that she's not Martha Stewart—and she's right, How to Stop Time reads more like an essay in the idiotic new lifestyle/shelter/coma magazine Real Simple. Marlowe should write for Real Simple, on how to combine severe, uncomfortable existentialism with furniture so minimalist that no one will ever come over, which would indeed make entertaining real simple.

If you're looking for voluptuous descriptions of nodding, or harrowing searches for working veins, How to Stop Time isn't that kind of book. "Dope babble" bothers the compulsively productive author, who'd rather talk about capitalism. Heroin, she says, branded with names like Body Bag, targets people who are "programmed" to desire risk and at the same time know how to purchase an aesthetic. She hangs this stuff up like flypaper: whatever sticks makes it into the book. "It surprised me how many preppies there were [at Harvard]. I had had this notion that Harvard existed to further scholarship," she prisses, "and it was a shock to discover that it had more to do with maintaining the ruling and professional classes in their position." This kind of thing is a defense mechanism, of course. Marlowe seems to think she's too intellectual to succumb to despair, but she already has.