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STANDING IN LINE AT THE MOVIES, I'M LISTENING to a friend chat with an old acquaintance who happens to be in line behind us. As they bemoan the state of San Francisco housing, the acquaintance mentions that her older sister just purchased a hunk of East Coast real estate. "She bought a six-room apartment," she says proudly. A dramatic pause, and then the kicker: "Without him."

Him? Who's him?

Oh, him. Right. I feel as though I've been transported into one of those General Mills International Coffee ads, where a knot of women sit around someone's living room with their Café Hazelnut Mochas, reinforcing female stereotypes for all they're worth. This woman is waiting for my friend to respond excitedly, but what is she supposed to say? "Wow, that's wonderful that your sister is able to summon the courage to buy an apartment without first meeting and marrying a tall, perfectly stubbled, George Clooney-looking software executive who will foot the bill for everything and then let her pick out all the pretty furniture"? Or, "Gosh, it's great that your sister isn't afraid to look like a pathetic spinster, what with having her very own apartment and all"?

It's weird to hear women still mouthing the kind of stuff that even Cosmo seems to know better than to print these days. But then, it's kind of a weird time to be a single woman.

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A Certain Age, Tama Janowitz's story of a woman whose ridiculously high standards preclude finding The Right Man.

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Mr. Right, if he does exist, is not some prefabricated image that has been marketed and sold to us. And marriage is not about spending the rest of our lives trying to be someone we are not.

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What these books do have in common is that they center on single women, and, as such, provide ruminations on what it means to be single. Duh, right? Sure-the problem is that the marketing doesn't reflect the fact that characters like

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I think people also use reality to understand fiction.

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Fiction, like reality, is also about perspective - the way one views the world and the way one views the self. Wierd as her writing may be at times, I would rather come to Margaret Atwood if I need a reality check than most of those writers Michelle mentioned. I liked how the article abreviated that woman's name as BJ - as if the woman was a disciple of phallocentric worship.

The sad thing is when one moves to a psychological look at fiction, one comes across Gilbert et al which tells us that if we don't question a fiction when we are presented with it, our brains automatically encode that fiction as reality. We may accept that the heroine is not real, but never question the attitudes and perspectives that get encoded as fact in our brains because we are too preoccupied with other aspects of the story to question them.