Trying to surface in a sea of choices

A thousand jokes have started with the line “a guy walks into a bar,” but Strawberry Saroyan’s memoir of her 20s (which correspond to the 1990s) in New York and Los Angeles, except for a few rueful asides, isn’t funny. It’s a painfully earnest account of what it’s like to be a young woman in a “postfeminist” era in which having the freedom to choose careers and lifestyles is taken for granted but in which this very freedom makes choices difficult.

A rough chronology can be teased out of “Girl Walks Into a Bar.” Saroyan, raised in hippie poverty, is studying poetry in Oregon when she loses her financial support. She transfers to Barnard College in New York “in search of a degree that would mean something to the outside world.” Still, she is “the child of a child of famous people (my grandfather was an author),” and she doesn’t fall far from the family tree, though she tries to: In this book, she never mentions William Saroyan (or, for that matter, her father, Aram) by name or discusses his literary legacy.

Saroyan becomes a journalist. In 1993, she lands an editorial job at Conde Nast Traveler. The fashion and media worlds are intoxicating. Fueled by high-octane ambition, she and a friend, Sarah, try to start their own magazine, Bleach, and seem well on their way to success when Saroyan burns out at age 25.

She moves to Los Angeles and amuses herself for a while with the denizens of a seedily hip bar, the Bounty, before their lack of purpose and their drug use repel her as much as the cutthroat world of Manhattan did.

Trying to strike a balance, she falls in with aspiring writers and filmmakers who meet every Thursday at fine restaurants, wearing their best clothes and letting valets park their junker cars -- all trying to find themselves by participating in a group fantasy of who they want to be.

This, in fact, is Saroyan’s theme throughout. Freedom to choose means that every choice seems somehow inauthentic -- seems like role-playing. She delays having sex for years, not because she has moral or religious scruples but because it seems too easy, which makes it hard. Strapped for money in New York, she is offered a high-paying job in a bank. She cries all night, unable to find any reason to turn down the job except that “I’m not the girl who works at the bank, you know?”

For a journalist, Saroyan tells us surprisingly little about people, events and places, providing little in the way of concrete detail. She focuses instead on what all these meant to her. We might have liked to learn more, for example, about what’s involved in starting a fashion magazine from scratch, given that Saroyan assures us: “Women’s magazines were far behind where we were, who we were.” How close was the Bleach project to fruition when she pulled out?

Instead, she exhaustively dissects her reasons for quitting. “I didn’t leave New York in the end because I was scared we wouldn’t succeed. I left because I was scared of succeeding.... I was afraid of my own predictability, and I was bored by it. I was afraid of what I knew would happen happening.... I knew that world so intimately from afar, I’d had my nose pressed up against the glass that looked into it for so long, that actually living in it -- joining the party -- seemed almost redundant.”

Similarly, she lets her longtime friendship with her Barnard roommate, Natasha, lapse because, in a strange way, it has been too nourishing. She blames it for her inability to find genuine love with men, one of whom, a manic-depressive and drug user named Sam, is given his own chapter. Saroyan feels she has to suspend her ties with Natasha to move on.

Two kinds of readers will dislike “Girl Walks Into a Bar.” Those who found a faith, a mate and a vocation early in life and are happy with those choices will wonder why Saroyan seems to look for love and fulfillment in all the wrong places; those who feel they had no choices will consider her superficial and spoiled.

But this book, to be fair, isn’t meant for them. It’s meant for young women like the author who strive to make their lives rather than have their lives handed to them, who value freedom at almost any cost. Theirs is no easy journey. Saroyan evokes the proud but lonely “click-click-clicking” of their high heels on city streets as they walk into bars not for the danger or abandon of it but in hope of finding their future in other souls like themselves.