by JULIET WATERS

Of all the women profiled in Simon Doonan’s Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons From Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulously Eccentric Women, my favourite is comic, writer and actress, Amy Sedaris.

As Doonan writes, Amy Sedaris generally gets cast in one of two roles: “Miss Lexington,” (as her brother, essayist David Sedaris, has christened her), for which she dons such an excruciatingly sincere expression that the overbite sometimes causes a rash on her chin; and “Piglet,” a demonically exaggerated trailer-park babe who rants lines like, “I don’t give a fuckidy fuck who the fuck you fuck—you ain’t getting a shit-smeared nickel outta me. Nobody was protecting my ass when I lost half the nerve endings in my pussy.”

In real life, however, it would be hard to pin her down to two personalities. Her brother once described her as, “Sybil with a better sense of humour, Eve without the crying jags.” Her “look” is Manolo Blahniks with aprons, preferably from True Value Hardware. When Doonan interviews her, she is in the midst of having her carpet replaced with Astroturf to accommodate her pet rabbit, Tattle-Tail. “The whole place is designed around her. Everything is painted with rustic woodgrain. I have a liquor cabinet that’s carved out of a tree trunk, and the walls are painted with Benjamin Moore green—cream of asparagus. There are woodland creatures, ceramic mushrooms and taxidermied squirrels.”

In so many ways Sedaris is an example of the acronym Doonan has invented to describe the classic characteristics of the Wacky Chick, BRUNCH, which stands for belligerent, resilient, uninhibited, naughty, creative and hilarious. But even while she’s using the word faggot every chance she can, there’s something inherently harmless about her. One also gets the sense that her wackiness really does ground her and protect her from the anxiety of trying to adapt to the world.

The same could be said of other W.C.s like Lisa Eisner, even when she describes herself as, “Always just a pussy hair from going over the edge.” (W.C.s love the word pussy.) The 44-year-old L.A. publisher is described as, “part Lucille Ball… and lots Sammy Davis.” A self-described “Drag King,” she went a little bonkers at a Sammy Davis estate sale 10 years ago, bought a Cadillac and cultivated “geezer chic.” This look is something of a tribute to her idol of style, Robert Evans, the L.A. producer who was recently the subject of the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture and Dustin Hoffman’s inspiration for his role in Wag the Dog.

While all are invariably hilarious, it’s hard not to be a little skeptical of Doonan’s campy, fashion-columnist hype. Some W.C.s give the impression that the pussy hair floated away many years ago. A typical example is Spider Fawke. Graduate of the esteemed design department of the Royal College of Art (“I was in the same year as the Emmanuels—those two pretentious cunts who made Princess Diana’s wedding dress”), she’s now a forest ranger who cultivates a home menagerie of exotic reptiles. One finds oneself also a little concerned about pro-choice activist Sunny Chapman, leader of Satanists 4 Life, who demonstrate alongside pro-lifers wearing horns and devil masks and holding placards that read, “Don’t abort your fetus… it could be the Anti-Christ!”

Doonan does acknowledge the thin line between Wacky Chick and Wack Job. In a final chapter he recalls the war between his wacky mother and wack-job grandmother and the first time he saw Betty Davis feed a rat to her disabled sister in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Instead of horror, he felt relief to finally see another family somewhat like his. Ultimately, he dismisses the distinction: “I happen to think that I was hugely enriched by growing up with both wacky chicks and wack-jobs.” But I could swear I hear something a little over-sincere in his tone, a tad “Miss Lexington” perhaps. n

Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulously Eccentric Women by Simon Doonan, Simon & Schuster, hc, 288pp, $38