RITA WILL: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser.<i> By Rita Mae Brown</i> .<i> Bantam: 480 pp., $23.95</i>

In the title of her new memoir, Rita Mae Brown defines herself as a “literary rabble-rouser.” In fact, Brown is one of those authors who must also be assessed for significant nonliterary reasons: as a media star and cultural icon.

Though she is best known for writing “Rubyfruit Jungle,” a very funny novel about growing up gay, and numerous other comic novels and screenplays (of varying quality), Brown’s earliest claims to fame were political. In 1964 she was forced out of the University of Florida, ostensibly for being a lesbian but really because of her activities against race discrimination. Five years later, she was expelled from the fledgling National Organization for Women for having the temerity to talk about being gay. (At that time, feminists were terrified of scaring off potential members with anything that smacked of weirdness.)

Expulsion simply fired Brown up, however. She helped form the famous lesbian Furies Collective, and she was one of the first public figures to be utterly candid about her sexual orientation, long before “coming out” or “outing” were even thought of.

Though no longer actively involved in lesbian and gay politics--these days she seems happiest fox-hunting on her farm in Charlottesville, Va.--Brown, with her fearless, funny public persona, is still something of an idol for many lesbians. (It helps that, at 52, she’s still stunningly good-looking. I once overheard a couple of women swooning over seeing Brown on the street. Gasped one, “She was just window-shopping!” I guess goddesses don’t shop.)

Being “America’s leading lesbian” (Brown’s own tag, only half tongue-in-cheek, but no longer entirely accurate) also means equal opportunity in the mainstream celebrity department. For a while, Brown’s love life seemed to have the makings of the worst kind of soap opera. First, in the early 1980s, came her affair with tennis star Martina Navratilova; Brown was described as a “lesbian wife” by the tabloids. As the affair ended, Navratilova’s sudden departure with basketball player Nancy Lieberman was dramatically hastened by Brown’s shooting out the back window of Navratilova’s BMW.

Adding further grist to the media mill, Brown then wrote a novel, “Sudden Death,” about the nasty practices of the international tennis circuit. She also had a short-lived fling with Navratilova’s post-Lieberman lover, former Texas beauty queen Judy Nelson--in the midst of Nelson’s alimony lawsuit against Navratilova. In 1993, Nelson wrote a nonfiction book, “Love Match: Nelson vs. Navratilova,” with an introduction by Brown. All of which proves, if nothing else, that lesbian celebrities are little different from their heterosexual counterparts. Back to Brown’s literary reputation.

Brown first exploded on the publishing scene in 1973 with her best-selling autobiographical novel, “Rubyfruit Jungle.” Funny, fast-paced and laced with Southern charm, the book features Molly Bolt, a take-me-or-leave-me lesbian who goes for what she wants with no apologies and gets a laugh out of it. With such a fine, warm comic creation, Brown achieved what then seemed impossible: a portrayal of lesbianism as something joyous, natural and human (a refreshing change from the shame-filled pages of 1950s pulp fiction). But “Rubyfruit Jungle” is also a classic American tale of one person’s fight against the system, resonating with the same truths that animate all good writing: Life’s pain isn’t the whole story; tragedy may also be absurd; hope is what keeps the human race ticking over; and humor brings enormous pleasure and release. “Rubyfruit Jungle” may not be great literature, but it is extremely good. If Brown had written nothing else, she would have earned her place in literary history.

Since then, though, she’s written nine novels, none of them up to the level of “Rubyfruit Jungle,” but all of them are enlivened by the same comic genius and Southern sensibility. One of Brown’s best is “Six of One,” a wonderful exploration of old age, based on the lives of her mother and her aunt. She’s also produced poetry; a well-regarded writer’s manual, “Starting from Scratch;” numerous television and film scripts--from the dismissible “The Slumber Party Massacre” to the more respectable Faulkner-derived “The Long Hot Summer” and the 1986 lesbian-themed ground-breaker “My Two Loves”--as well as five light-hearted murder mysteries co-written with her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown.

One would think that such a productive, provocative life ought to add up to a highly amusing, thoughtful, action-packed memoir. Surprisingly, it does not. To be sure, it’s funny at times--Brown probably couldn’t avoid cracking a joke even with a gun held to her head--yet overall, “Rita Will” is a long-winded flop.

The first clue as to what went wrong is in the third paragraph. “I couldn’t cram my entire life into here even if I had 22 volumes.” Unfortunately it feels like she’s trying. Just as a child tells a story, “and then, and then, and then,” one event tips over into the next, facts pile on facts, anecdote upon anecdote, with little sense of story or theme. A detailed recounting of her childhood love of flowers, curiosity in Jesus, desire for jeans and yearning for hot-fudge sundaes, for example, simply isn’t compelling enough.

For someone who usually writes rhythmical, tightly honed prose, this narrative laxity is strange. And Brown seems to sense it. Toward the end of the book, she confides, “If you wrote the story of my life, you could probably structure it better than I can.” If only she’d paid more attention to that writerly instinct.

Problems of structure are compounded by cliche-ridden, boring language. Grand Central Station in New York is merely “a wonderful example of public architecture,” Boston “an exquisite architectural jewel.” Of her youthful weekly agitprop performances in New York, Brown says, “the audience howled,” but why? The color, the detail, is missing.

Equally uninspiring are liberally strewn pieces of homespun wisdom, such as “the things people do to themselves are far more damaging than what nature dishes out,” “love is an act of faith” and “all life is a conversation between those who went before, those alive now, and those who will come after.” There’s nothing wrong with these sentiments. It’s just that after nearly 500 pages, I felt that if I read one more banality, I’d scream.

On the plus side, curious fans will learn a significant number of details about Brown’s life, from the true story of her poverty-stricken upbringing as an adopted child in rural Pennsylvania and suburban Florida (including a touching discovery about her real father) to further minutiae about those romantic escapades of tabloid fame--most notably with Navratilova, Nelson and the actress and novelist Fannie Flagg, author of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe.”

There’s nothing overly revealing, however. And some may be disappointed to discover that romance doesn’t play a large role in Brown’s life, thanks perhaps to her preference for animal rather than human company--the cat stories are among the liveliest in the book--and her need for artistic solitude and an apparent problem with long-term relationships.

Refreshingly, she recognizes the difficulties of self-assessment, noting the ambiguities in her self-portrait. On the one hand, she is someone who “did not see the world as a terrible place” and on the other, she is a woman who fought to integrate the University of Florida, who paid her dues in the feminist movement and who got misty-eyed at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. She repeatedly refers to herself as a “lone wolf” but then yearns for human connection. Brown throws up her hands, never drawing all of the strands of her life together. “I no longer have any desire to control my life,” she says. “I simply want to live in divine chaos.”

Still, nearly every subject Brown tackles feels only partially explored, and though in the end there are hints of a complex mind at work, we don’t really gain a clearer sense of Brown than we had in the beginning. She portrays herself as a somewhat one-dimensional woman who speaks her mind and likes to laugh a lot. Even in her 50s, Brown still plays practical jokes, and the story in “Rubyfruit Jungle,” in which the heroine puts dye in the school shower, really did take place.

It’s possible she felt restricted by the use of real life and real names. She writes with a sense of caution that might also explain why so much of the comedy in the book falls flat. As in all her work, Brown recognizes quite rightly that a comic vision can treat serious subjects. But “Rita Will’s” humor has the feel of a stand-up shtick, filled with superficial one-liners rather than with the insights we find in the autobiographies of the other great Southern writers, such as Dorothy Allison and Mary Karr. Bumping up awkwardly against the earnest aphorisms, Brown’s comedy hides more than it reveals.

Perhaps, too, part of the problem is that “Rita Will” is yet another reworking of the material that inspired Brown’s novels. As a novelist, she knows how to spin select details from her life into something fine and delicate. Brown’s adoptive mother Juts and her Aunt Mimi glowed in their fictional incarnations as wisecracking-yet-multifaceted old birds in “Six of One.” In “Rita Will,” the same details sit tiredly on the page. Though there’s a hint of Brown’s complicated feelings about them, the women are little more than the sum of their good-humored kvetching. I also detected Brown’s middle-age impatience with her youthful experimentation; she skates over her experiences with political activism as if she were anxious to get through them.

In fact, there is such a strong current of awkward diffidence in this book that I sensed that the real Rita Mae Brown got away. So apparently did she: “I confided in no one,” she writes. “That, for better or for worse, remains part of my character. I’ll happily tell you what I’m thinking. I won’t tell you what I’m feeling until I’ve known you for about five years and seldom then.” Clearly, her biographers will have their work cut out.