Like many of her fans, I thought Andrea Dworkin was brilliant but reductive. Without realising it, I'd absorbed the popular image of her as the man-hating sloganiser who'd boiled down all the complexity of the sex war to a few simple maxims. "Women need land and guns" - I liked that one. "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." Was that her? When she died in 2005, I joined [...]

Is it me or is everything shit? I've been asking myself this for the past five years. Before that, I believed the decadence and banality of our society was a simple fact - irrefutable except by those with a financial incentive to maintain the global monoculture of "cool". Then a therapist told me that the shitness I perceived as "out there" was actually a projection of the internal shit, the [...]

One of the things I most enjoyed about life on a psychiatric ward was the release from social obligation. An unwritten rule said it was perfectly acceptable to abandon a conversation without apologising or explaining. In the first few days, I couldn't listen to anyone; then it was the sound of my own voice that struck me as an offence against the sacred air. I'd run out of steam mid-sentence, [...]

When I first started going to pubs, I was greatly impressed by the friend who consistently refused the injunction to drink up. I thought he was just being lairy, then realised that his indignation was genuine and deeply felt. When he heard the words "Can you start to make a move now, please", he would look puzzled - as if trying to retrace the chain of events that had given [...]

I didn't watch BBC4 for ages because, rather childishly, I resented Andrew Marr telling me that I should. The notion that the channel was a worthy cause which the middle classes had a duty to support had a negative impact on decisions about my early evening view-ing schedule. Confronted with a choice between Pop Idol and a profile of a German composer, I would generally plump for the former. If [...]

When I was a little girl, I went to a wrestling match with one of my crazed Cornish aunts. The thing that scared me, much more than the antics of the men in the ring, was the women, whose faces were contorted in what seemed like genuine hatred for the black-caped baddie. The thing they were shouting at wasn't real, but somehow their emotion was. I'd never understood what they [...]

Everywhere I've been this summer, I've met people whose professed aim in life is to find a way out of the conceptual crisis created by "postmodernism". The most engaging of these was a left-wing commentator who buttonholed me at a party in his Islington garden about the need for a "return to truth". Less appealing were the speakers at an Institute of Ideas conference, who referred to "the relativists" as [...]

More, Now, Again is a breathless 4am splurge of a confessional. Elizabeth Wurtzel understands her audience well enough to know that it won't want to be spared the details of the state she got herself into when trying to palliate the pain of her existence. Happily for all concerned, Wurtzel is as fascinated by the seamier side of her addictions as we are delighted to read about the evenings she [...]

Before I do anything else, I must thank my friends Tim and Ed for making me see Jean-Luc Godard. This was by no means an easy task. Such as it was, my knowledge of the great French director gave me the distinct impression that a summer evening spent watching his work would be worthwhile, rather than fun. The recommendation from Tim and Ed did nothing to make me change my [...]

The advertising posters for Shrek show a picture of the little green monster on whose story the film is based. Dwarfing that, in huge letters on either side, are the names of a number of famous Hollywood actors - Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, John Lithgow and Cameron Diaz. Ah, you think, they must be the stars. You wouldn't think for one minute that these actors won't be recognisable, because the [...]