Girl Walks Into a Bar Strawberry Saroyan HarperCollins, 208pp, £12.99 ISBN 0007118961

The summer before Strawberry Saroyan started college, her younger brother and sister were admitted to a drug rehabilitation hospital for teenagers, forcing her arty parents to find themselves "proper" jobs for the first time. In this alternative, bohemian household, the best form of rebellion was academic success. Accordingly, Saroyan applied herself to her studies, revelling in her role as "hope of the family". Instead of being yet another 12-Step Shocker, this memoir tells of how, having graduated from Barnard in 1990, Strawberry strode into glittering Manhattan and devoted herself to scaling the slithery slopes of the glossies empire at Conde Nast.

At least, this accounts for around one half of Girl Walks Into a Bar. During her five years in New York, Saroyan created a life for herself that became a case of "good anecdote, bad reality". What she did next, at just 25 years of age, was to jet off to LA as she teetered on the verge of a sophisticated, "media land" nervous breakdown.

In ruminative fashion, Saroyan depicts those exhilarating first few years after graduation. Against a backdrop of slebby parties and glittering book launches, she describes the friendships she forged, her dalliances with older men, and how she and a friend launched their own magazine. Then there are the bars. Her favourites are those propped up by charming drunks, artful slackers, and pretty men whose main attraction is that they are stylishly going to pieces.

There is another regular, too: Saroyan's alter ego, the elusive girl of the title, chicly clad in uniform black, click-clacking out just ahead of Saroyan on the kind of high heels that sound so good pounding a city pavement. Sometimes Saroyan comes close to catching up with her, to actually becoming her, although this isn't really the point. Instead, she represents the trendy ideal of an urban twentysomething, running on lattes, sushi and too little sleep.

Saroyan's prose is questing and confiding, laced with hipster lingo and wistfulness, but she is good at pinpointing a certain kind of angry ambition, a metropolitan loneliness, a sense of red-carpet invisibility that comes from having flashbulbs go off around you. The problem is that while Saroyan's bad reality constantly intrudes on her would-be good anecdotes (her tragicomic accounts of attempting to lose her virginity are particularly mawkish), she offers little by way of analysis that could not be found in any women's magazine. Saroyan hams up her hindsight; she prefaces her pearls of washroom wisdom with little-me phrases like,"Of course I didn't realise it at the time . . ."; or, worse, "I saw then that that was what so many of my discussions with my therapist had been about . . .". She ominously alludes to poems she has since written, but none of this makes her, or us, any wiser.

This memoir has all the ingredients of a frothy novel: young, go-getting girl arrives in the big city, burns out, falls in love, falls out of love, and finally realises that, when all is told, a girl's best friend is her best friend. But it gets better - in a breathlessly twee final chapter, Saroyan sights the enormous "Three O" approaching, and drops our "wandering girl" in black for a new fantasy role model. She has always seen her grown-up self, she reveals, in England, "with a big old beautiful house in the country, surrounded by rolling green vistas in front of me and little laughing children around me, and with a bright and British husband". How cosy.

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