REPRODUCTION LINE

After a bad experience years ago (I read a rave review of “Total Womanhood” by Phyllis Shoo-fly), I vowed never again to read propagandistic reviews of fiction by living, female writers whose heroines take to their beds, eat food from cardboard containers, resume a smoking or drinking habit, all because they can’t get knocked up.

It’s not that I suffer from Biological Clock Syndrome--the yuppie belief that in addition to perfect health, access to medical care, a great job, safe, clean housing, super recreational opportunities, an understanding husband and a pension, the world owes me at least one perfect reproduction of myself--nor is it because Terry Brand-all said it already and gets more press.

It’s just that we don’t need (reviewer) Joyce Walter (“Perfect Together” by Nora Johnson, Aug. 25) in order to make the acquaintance of a propaganda system that has told us from the beginning of time, “Whatever you got, if you ain’t got little reproductions of yourself, you ain’t got nada!” In a world of famine and misery, with millions of babies dying every day of malnutrition, if I see another propagandistic rave of a book about a terminally spoiled yuppie lady whining about her biological clock, I’m going to take to my bed and start writing review heads with grammatically impossible prepositional endings!

LEONORA DE AVILA, LONG BEACH