My Life as a Gal

A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kahn assembles previously published ""memoirs, essays and outright silliness'' in this successor to her first collection, Multiple Sarcasms. The writer credited with inventing the term ``Yuppie'' now adds another bit of lingua franca in the essay ``How to Raise a Perfect CHUMP, Child of Upwardly Mobile Professionals.'' Among the targets of Kahn's acidly satiric pen: the American Booksellers Association convention and Simon & Shyster exhibits that suggest most readers have the mentality of preschool children; gay communists; Jane Fonda ``going '80s'' without sacrificing her values (except anti-capitalism) as she markets fitness and wins hearts and behinds; sex and love; pop psychology; pornography. ``Legacy of the Oval Bed'' theorizes on the sexual relations between the last six Presidents and their First Ladies, dwelling on ``the contented cowboy and his lady in red.'' (May 1)