NONFICTION - May 28, 1995

IF YOU LEAVE ME, CAN I COME TOO? by Cynthia Heimel (Atlantic Monthly Press: $20; 288 pp.) If she lived in the apartment next to yours, you’d be grateful; to share it with her would kill you. Another way to put it: Heimel, Village Voice columnist and author, most recently, of “Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Goodbye,” is the friend you want to visit after a crisis, not before or during one. These columns have a very similar roll to them: Kamikaze dive toward conclusion about how to survive as a woman, followed by last-minute failure to land by terrified pilot. Take the last three lines of the essay, “Sleepless in Sandusky”: “But now we don’t care much about sex anymore. Matriarchy is right around the corner. Or maybe I just really need a nap.” Everything sacrificed on the altar of laughs.

And the shtick index is very high, so if you have a low tolerance for women who have to tell you everything they eat when depressed, beware. “The Hidden Life of Women Who Run With the Dogs,” and “The Celestine Cliff Notes” (“ . . . if you leave the tristate area for Memorial Day weekend you will inevitably find yourself amidst a horde of Celestomaniacs.”) are fair game as far as I’m concerned, but like all good humor, at some point you will be offended. The humorist’s audience is a moving target, and the essay, “If I Were a Black Man,” pretty much killed me. “People would be scared of me,” she writes in the first line. “I just might like that . . . would it be a kick to inspire fear just by my very presence?” Lines that strikes me as sub-intelligent. For you, it might be the pieces “Smart People in L.A.!” or “Intimacy With Vomit.”