Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants: Based on a True Story

This hilarious, whip-smart collection of essays from a top writer and producer of Six Feet Under crisscrosses from the highly personal (conflating her own loss of virginity and the Kobe Bryant accusations), to the political (what she has in common with Monica and Chandra), to the outrageously Los Angelean (why women wear huge diamonds and what they must do to get them). Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants is a genre-defying combination of personal essay and memoir, or a hilarious, unruly and unapologetic evaluation of society, religion, sex, love, and -- best of all -- Jill Soloway.

Publishers Weekly

There's one joke that Soloway, writer and co-executive producer of Six Feet Under, keeps coming back to, about a little girl who tells her mom a boy has paid her to climb a telephone pole. Her mom keeps telling her he just wants to see her panties... so the girl says she's "fooled" him, by taking them off. It's an apt metaphor for Soloway's view of women's situation today, which, she says, is ruled by the "Porno-ization of America," with younger women wanting breast implants and white boys thinking pimps are the height of cool. Soloway's rants are right-on and entertaining, too, probably because she includes herself among the occasionally deluded. She recounts her own 1970s upbringing as a liberated child who thought she might become president, only by seventh grade she'd "forgotten what Bella Abzug looked like" and gotten her "Ophelia card stamped." Fortunately, she recovered to become a delightfully sex-positive "Jewess" ("a word invented by others to conjure someone bossy... that I have reappropriated as prideful") who can joke about her cute "Jewish bush," her fun lesbian sister and her own unaccountable attraction to "Toolbelts" (hunky construction worker kind of guys). Soloway's book is an amusing work of feminist humor. Agent, Dan Greenberg. (Sept. 14) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Jill Soloway is an Emmy-nominated writer and co-executive producer for HBO's Six Feet Under and creator of Sit n' Spin, a night of comedic storytelling in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husfriend and her son.