‘Bossy, Miss Bossy’ Is No Soft Touch : Advice: Her column has been called a hoot. But E. Jean Carroll is honest and straight to the point. Her formula in letters? ‘Just do it!’

E. Jean Carroll’s readers ought to meet her. In person, the high-spirited advice columnist for Elle magazine takes the woman’s art of easy rapport to a new dimension. Witness her first meeting with an interviewer in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan.

“You have great hair!” she exclaimed with charming conviction. “Is it natural? . . . Who does it? . . . What does it look like in daylight?”

Now this is a woman you can sit down and talk to. This former Hoosier beauty queen is Everywoman’s dream big sister--ready with tart observations and sage advice.

OK, so even she calls herself “bossy, Miss Bossy,” but what better trait for someone willing to take on the problems of people of whom she asks, “To what depth have they sunk to write to a stranger at a fashion magazine?”

“It’s something about my red corpuscles,” says Carroll, whom fans will also recognize as the author of “Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson” (Plume, $12). “I’m very strong in my life. Not to say I’m not riddled with flaws of every kind. But I can take on all these problems.”

Her column--”Ask E. Jean”--debuted in September in the first revamped issue of Elle since Amy Gross took over as editorial director a year ago. Gross discovered Carroll (the E stands for Elizabeth) through her regular articles in Esquire. (“I do the boys and the girls,” says Carroll, whose writing career began in 1979 with the rare purchase by Esquire of an unsolicited, humorous quiz on Hemingway and Fitzgerald.)

Gross was struck by Carroll’s “way of responding to whoever her subject was. It was unprogrammed, warmhearted, funny.” And she was “a wild woman beyond the inhibitions of normal constraints,” Gross says.

“Ask E. Jean” has been called subversive, a hoot and cheeky hyperbole. One male reader recently accused Carroll of “relentless male bashing.”

Asked about that, Carroll owns up to it. “Nobody loves a man better than me,” she says, but adds: “Sometimes men need to be bashed. More than bashed. But sometimes women need to be bashed. We all need to be bashed.”

Still, despite her often-irreverent style, when it comes to serious issues--depression, being HIV positive, sexual harassment--she is sensitive and sensible.

“I like her on serious topics,” says Joyce Gottlieb, a social worker in New York City who runs the West Side Mood Disorders Support Group and who agreed to review a sample of columns. “She’s very good, really on target.”

Having met hundreds of women through the mail, Carroll, 50, has strong general words of counsel for them, the short version of which might be: Lighten up and fly right. Or left. Or sideways. Whichever way you want. Only fly. What she hears too often in female readers, she says, is a fear of life, a fear of adventure, a fear of “breaking the parameters.”

“We’re screwing up our daughters’ education,” she says. “Young women today don’t know what they can do, so they write to me to see what they should do.”

Women are being bred for love and security, she says, and these are such natural instincts, you don’t need to instill them. What young women need to learn is that they are free to follow more than one dream. And if she has one formula for answering letters, it is, “Do it! Just do it! No matter what the question is, many times that’s all they want to hear.”

Her letters and faxes--she gets at least three dozen a month--can cover anything from a woman incensed over a haircut to graphic sexual quandaries. But usually, Carroll says, they fall into three areas: general malaise or confusion about what to do in life, career questions and, of course, sex.

Oh, there’s a fourth category, she says: women who have lost their man. “You want to shake ‘em,” she says. “Life is not about guys! I’ve taken it upon myself to explain this. I don’t know what the hell it is about, but it’s not about guys!”

So don’t look to E. Jean for easy answers about finding Mr. Right.

“Marriage is a prison,” she says. “The only reason to get married is children.”

Call it a blind spot, but it’s not as if she hasn’t been there. She has been married twice, in each case, to men she still counts as friends.

She advises women “to become more athletic and strong, to jump, to run, to swim, to become physically strong . . . to become mentally vibrant by reading the great classics, not watching TV, not reading the National Enquirer. Read Tolstoy, Chekhov, Simone de Beauvoir, Jane Austen . . . George Eliot . . . something other than Elle, Esquire. . . . Women must read.”

She would also tell them to stop taking themselves so seriously. “I notice that people who are really happy do not take themselves so seriously,” she says. “You can take your work seriously. Your family seriously. But you shouldn’t take yourself so seriously. Or your boyfriend. You can take your husband seriously. I know women who take their boyfriends more seriously than themselves!”

Finally, women should “stop thinking about what they look like.” Yes, she says, “It’s very important how we look. We are judged on how we look. You can spend a small percentage of time scheming to be beautiful but not all the time. I have seen a brilliant woman who was plain take a whole room on.

“Haven’t you?”