Getting a life: Michael Harris offers an underwhelming review in the LA Times of Girl Walks Into a Bar, the new memoir by Strawberry Saroyan:

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. Read more.

Penelope Trunk offered a more simpatico review in LA Weekly:

Girl Walks Into a Bar (Random House), is a primer for the media–world wannabe: how to get a job out of college; how to party with the rich and famous; how to get so good that you can reject amorous advances from editors; how to get so sick of yourself that you have to leave the city. How to return to your hometown, Los Angeles, and reinvent yourself — successfully.

Read a book excerpt

Also, The San Francisco Chronicle and Mercury News chew over Wired: A Romance by Gary Wolf and the LAT Book Review features The Mailroom: Hollywood History From the Bottom Up by David Rensin.