I, Me, Mine : GIRLS ONLY.<i> By Alex Witchel</i> .<i> Random House: 240 pp., $22</i>

If the New York Times is still known as the Gray Old Lady, don’t blame reporter Alex Witchel. Specializing in sassy profiles of middlebrow pop culture figures, Witchel is known for her stylish writing, refreshingly irreverent wit and just plain bitchiness (in a typical recent piece, she described diet doctor Robert C. Atkins as “wary,” “angry” and “obsessively defensive” and wondered if the word “megalomaniac” was apt). She is the proud queen of the anti-puff piece.

But something has gone terribly wrong with her first book, “Girls Only.” The reporter who skewers the banalities, sentimental cliches and hilarious egocentricities of her subjects has written a memoir that is banal, sentimentally cliched and hilariously egocentric. Witchel is like the pastry chef who, for unexplained reasons, has tossed out the lemon peel and loaded up on NutraSweet--or, perhaps, like the physician who has forgotten to heal herself.

Witchel, who is “almost 40,” was raised in the upscale New York suburb of Scarsdale, went to an undistinguished college and became a theater critic and then a cultural reporter for the Times. (She is married to Frank Rich, the Times’ former theater critic and current Op-Ed columnist.) But “Girls Only” is not so much a chronological autobiography as an examination--if that is the word--of Witchel’s relationship with her mother, Barbara, and younger sister, Phoebe (the “girls” of the title; Witchel’s father and two brothers are almost absent from this family narrative).

Barbara is an impressive woman who ran a household, maintained a marriage and raised four children while earning a doctorate and becoming a college professor--this at a time when the feminine mystique was in full force. “My mother,” Witchel writes, was “having it all and doing it all 25 years before most women even began to realize that it couldn’t be done.”

Phoebe is less accomplished than Alex but also, it is implied, prettier. For the most part, Alex sees Phoebe as a reflection of herself--”It’s flattering to have a little semi-you hanging on your every word”--and seems to delight in frustrating her younger sibling.

Structurally, the book is an elaboration of several articles Witchel wrote for the New York Times, in which--with Mom, and sometimes Phoebe, in tow--Alex checked out various upscale New York hotels and stores. (It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.) One might think such articles were quite sufficient the first time around, and one would be right. Nevertheless, it is all reprised: the discovery that the famed tea at the Stanhope Hotel is overrated; the revelation that the trendy, austere Bridgehampton Motel is actually a drag; the epiphany that Bergdorf Goodman is full of outrageously expensive clothes and the rich women who can, outrageously, afford them.

The book’s conceit--and the source of its greatest failure--is that, through these expeditions, Witchel discovered the truth of her familial relations. The problem is the nature of these “truths,” which virtually never rise above the kind of pop psychology Witchel would (and has) skewered in her profiles.

She muses, “As long as my parents are alive, I guess I’ll always be a child.” She notices that “what every kid really wants . . . is to have mommy all to herself.” She suggests, “Maybe growing up meant freedom from my childhood self. . . . Or not.” And, sinking into what may be the nadir of narcissism, she proclaims that “I love being a daughter, seeing myself in the Mommy Mirror, asking if I’m the fairest of them all and hearing the resounding ‘Yes!’ ”

For this she went through years of therapy?

“Girls Only” is an almost perfect example of the recent literary confusion between information and insight. The book is studded with what Tom Wolfe termed “status life” details: We learn, for instance, that Alex buys “toilet paper, Scott towels, aluminum foil in huge quantities,” that her mother gave her a cream-colored Christian Dior nightgown, that she adores tuna fish, that she uses Clinique makeup, that she finds diaphragms too slippery and that she wore a lavender dress, white lace stockings and black Mary Janes to her grandmother’s funeral.

What’s unclear is why we learn these things, or even what it means to “learn” them. Wolfe (and his dead white male predecessors like Flaubert and Balzac) used such details to create a critical mass with which to construct devastating, funny portraits of individuals and social classes. For Witchel, though, the details are simply scattered randomly across the pages, signifying nothing. As the Calvin Klein ads say, “Just be.”

There are two sections where “Girls Only” comes alive--perhaps because Witchel stops gazing into the mirror and looks out at the world. One is her portrait (also based on a Times story) of Gypsy Rose Lee’s sister, the actress June Havoc, whose life sounds about a million times more fun and sad and interesting than Witchel’s. The other is her discussion of her two stepsons--her love and admiration for these kids is obviously very real--and her unrepentant, even defiant, defense of being a stepmother: “As the unbiological . . . part-time mother” she writes, she’ll always be second best. “And you know what? I still choose what I have and just that. Not more. Not other.”

Too often, though, Witchel settles for cute and sentimental writing. The acerbic reporter who works for the Times has, apparently, gone into hiding--for surely she would have canceled a book contract rather than describe her family as a treacly “pillow . . . the soft, protected place to come to at the end of a day, to hug, to cry into, to lean on.” Surely she would not refer to her breasts as “my cupcakes.”

And the book is often surprisingly tasteless: Perhaps the author should have refrained from offering a “tip” to “uninitiated” bulimic girls that they should “always end a meal with ice cream. It comes up easily.” Or have found a better way to describe walking through the lovely spiral of the Guggenheim Museum than as “like going down a toilet in slow motion.”

Reading a bad memoir naturally makes one think about what makes a good one. It is not necessarily--pace such wonderful writers as Mary Karr, Susanna Kaysen, Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff and Richard Rayner--an extraordinary life. Extreme trauma, loss, abuse are not required. On the contrary: The true memoirist is one who can see--and describe--the terror and beauty that lie just under the surface of the most ordinary events.

This is especially true for memoirs that center on a parent-child bond. I think, for instance, of British writer Adam Mars-Jones’ “Blind Bitter Happiness” (recently published in Granta), a lovely, disturbing homage to his strong, sad, quietly unexceptional mother. (“One of Sheila’s virtues . . . was to have stopped telling us, quite early on, that everything was going to be all right,” he writes.) Or of Hilton Als’ “The Women,” his puzzled but unblinking look at the immigrant from Barbados who cleaned houses and styled hair and gave birth to him and five others, “though she remained unconvinced that having children was the solution to the issue of isolation.” Or of Doris Lessing’s “Under My Skin,” an account of her conventional childhood in colonial Africa that is, nonetheless, filled with the fresh rage and anguish attendant upon such epochal events as being forced to take a nap.

What’s missing from “Girls Only,” then, isn’t hair-raising, blood-chilling, spine-tingling, earth-shattering, psyche-crushing events. It is the capacity--and the willingness--to grasp the complexity, the denseness, the ambiguity and above all the mystery of the ways in which families create (and destroy) themselves. It is the courage to dispense with neatness, one-liners and desultory facts. It is the ability to make connections between seemingly discrete, fragmented emotions--an ability that, clearly, not all newspaper reporters (even good ones) have. What’s missing, in short, is not just a memoirist’s voice but a memoirist’s vision.