As someone who comes from a long line of people who learned how to drive late in life, and who only got her own license in her late 20s, I loved the title essay of Katha Pollitt's collection Learning to Drive, And Other Life Stories when it came out in The New Yorker. I've recommended it to so many of my non-driving New York friends over the years that I was a bit taken aback to find it at all controversial upon republication. To me, this essay was much more about learning to drive than about a failed relationship, but then again I always thought not knowing how to drive was a quintessentially New York City thing, rather than a chick thing.

Indeed, because my father has the world's best series of excuses for not having learned how to drive until he was in his 50s, I want to address the driving issue before I dive into other questions, such as feminism, love, betrayal, nature of the self, etc., etc.

There are many things a story about learning to drive can reveal about a life. As my father explains it, for example, his own long road to driving began while growing up in rural Northern Italy in the 20s and 30s, where the predominant mode of transportation was still horse-drawn carts. Then, in '36, he moved to New York, where people got around by subway. After the war, he moved to Venice, where the major mode of transportation was the gondola, and then to a small town on the Italian Riviera that was designed for a pre-automotive foot- and donkey-based world, featuring lots of staircases and tiny, narrow streets. After that, it was back to New York and the subways, and, then, with my mother in tow, on to Mexico, where, because he had to, my father finally learned how to drive.

My mother, for her part, did not learn to drive until she was in her 40s, and my sister, a confirmed New Yorker and accomplished young neuroscientist now in her 30s, still does not know how to drive.

Not knowing how to drive in New York is not an admission of anti-feminist weakness or some kind of other character defect; it is a function of the city's strong public transportation system and the local culture of walking for entertainment as well as to get places. (I recall hanging out with a group of male friends one summer evening during college and realizing that all the Jews in the group were from New York, wore glasses, and couldn't drive, while the New England WASPs in the group still had their vision, had played lacrosse and other exotic -- to me -- sports in high school, and could drive. It was like some kind of Woody Allen joke writ large.)

Katha is as much a child of the city as any of my own family members who got their first licenses at ages when many people have moved on to their first minivan or midlife crisis sports-car. So I don't think that Katha's admission of an inability to drive is what's really upsetting people about her book. One can tell charming stories about not knowing how to drive and learning to do so late in life, or even stories about it that radiate a new hope for self-reliance, as with Katha's aspiration to be mujer de metal at the end of her story.

Nor is it the essay on new motherhood, "Beautiful Screamer," that's proved so nettleome, or the one on the difficult friendships women try to maintain with other women who have betrayed or hurt them, "Sisterhood," or the ambivalently loving elegy for her alcoholic mother who died too soon, "Mrs. Razzmatazz."

I think it's something else. There's something in the cumulative impact of reading all these essays and the way that they are strung together that's akin to going back and reading your own diaries from a string of difficult years. It's not just that they don't represent who you are today --it's that they don't even represent who you were then. They are partial recollections and sometimes obsessive attempts to work through deep hurt (as in the essay "Webstalking"), but clearly reflective only of the, say, the twenty minutes a day Katha was not out and about being impressive and competent, but rather trying to sort out her life at a deeper level.

It is not that Katha -- and please forgive me for talking about you in the third person like this! -- has showed us her private, humiliated self, but that she has somehow presented an image to us as if it were the essential truth about who she is, when we can tell from her writing and the public self we have come to know over the years that it is not. She is so much more than the person in these stories.

To take a specific example, the Katha in this book calls herself a poor observer -- and yet the keenness of her descriptions, especially of the characters one sees on a typical New York street in the final essay, "I Let Myself Go," are so sharp you could cut glass with them. What a mind! So much rippling energy, looking for a place to land. The essays reminded me that she came to political writing through poetry and being a literary editor, and that she consequently approaches and looks at the world in a different way from your average political analyst. Her vivid descriptions and casual observations -- quick and cutting -- made me laugh aloud. The writing in the book is, to use the favorite word of a U.K. friend, just splendid.

And yet the problem with personal writing is that in the end no matter how universal the themes you treat -- love, heart-break, betrayal -- and no matter how well you turn a phrase, you always wind up just telling one story, marked as out as uniquely your own by the specific facts of time, place, and family history. The story of betrayal and heartbreak may be universal, but the story of joining a Marxist study group and shopping at the Housing Works Thrift Store is not.

And it is in the gap between that universal personal and her highly individual one that, I'd wager, her critics have found themselves discomfited.