GUYNECOLOGY

She arrived in Los Angeles at seventeen with a Danish bus pass that said she was twenty-one. Within weeks, a Belgian pop duo was chasing her out of the Roxbury, convinced she ran an escort agency.

She didn't. But that was only the first night.

In Guynecology, Camilla Rantsen tells fourteen true stories about men, Hollywood and the strange business of being a woman in both. Her best friend Sophie is there for the early ones. They hide a Thomas Guide in their oversized blazers and get driven up Nichols Canyon by a club owner who turns out not to own a club. By the end of that night, he's put a gun on the coffee table.

From there it only gets stranger. She goes on a New Year's ski trip with a boyfriend who decides she isn't "religiously desirable." She lives in a house in the Hollywood flats where the ghosts dress better than the roommates. She raises a timber wolf she's not technically allowed to own. A friend's house hunt gets decoded as a dating profile. Americans get told, firmly, that Christmas is on the twenty-fourth. And Tinkerbell finally says what she thinks of Peter Pan.

Under the jokes is a woman who stopped eating for a decade and started again, who lost friends and kept some, and who has a few things to say to the decent men about what women have always known.

It's sharp, unfiltered and very funny, and it ends with a playlist.

For readers who like their memoirs honest and their humor dark, from a writer who believes in the healing power of using your words.