NONFICTION - Feb. 27, 1994

TELLING: Confessions, Concessions, and Other Flashes of Light by Marion Winik (Villard Books: $18; 224 pp.). Marion Winik, as she tells us early on in this collection of essays, is an exhibitionist: in reckless youth she read publicly her poetry about one-night stands, loved to take hard drugs and go to trendy nightclubs, one time even auditioned to be a topless dancer. As a married mother of two living in Texas, Winik now leads a distinctly more sedate life--but still makes good use of her exhibitionistic tendencies, by channeling it into prose. Despite the title, however, “Telling” is no confessions of a mad housewife, full of sublimated anger, double-edged one-liners, redeeming triumphs; it’s much better than that, Winik--a columnist for the Austin Chronicle and a commentator for National Public Radio--being too smart, and too experienced, to write according to formula. In the title essay, for example, she makes the consummate distinction between honesty and telling--”Where honesty is pure, telling expects results”--yet her own telling, paradoxically, feels honest, emotionally if not literally true. In “This Is Not My Beautiful House,” she surveys in amazement her transformation from “feminist vegetarian prodigal daughter” into married, mothering homeowner; in “How Do I Look?”, a description of childhood battles with fat and other physical ailments, she finds that “I’m stuck with the past I believe in, even if it’s wrong. . . . Even if the woman I am now looks all right, the girl I was then never will.” As the essays just mentioned make clear, Winik often writes about familiar subjects, but her voice is so true and clear and compassionate we’re happy to listen to any story she wants to tell.