What happens next is an attention-starved drama queen’s dream: the editors of City Week invite Ariel to write a weekly column, envisioning a “true confessions of a single girl” kind of thing, “a perils of Pauline from a slacker slut perspective.” The editors want Ariel to go on dates and literally kiss and tell. “Go get busy,” they say. And she does.

That’s the premise of Run Catch Kiss, Amy Sohn’s first book, which is billed as fiction but bears many striking resemblances to the author’s actual life. Like Steiner, Sohn wanted to be an actress and instead fell into writing a first-person sex column for an alternative newspaper (the New York Press). Sohn, like Steiner, regales thousands of New Yorkers with explicit details of her romantic and not-so-romantic encounters. While Steiner — or is it Sohn? — has a loyal female audience that appreciates her candor, a great number of her readers are heavy-breathers who keep her column next to their old copies of Hustler magazine. 

In the book Steiner doesn’t care. She is less interested in acting or journalism than in “walking into a room and having her reputation precede her.” The City Week column gives her the exposure she so desperately craves. Sohn once told a reporter that she wanted to become the “queen of all media.” She and her character, it seems, have one consuming desire in common: “Look at me!”

Run Catch Kiss, named after a kids’ game, tracks Ariel Steiner’s rise and fall as a columnist. Despite her constant neediness and self-doubt, Ariel is smart, funny, sexy, and painfully frank, a seductress in a minimizer bra and control-top pantyhose. So why does she punish herself by pursuing men who are alternately selfish, emotionally dysfunctional, and opposed to kissing? We never really understand why Ariel is drawn to cretins, other than that they make her columns colorful. Then the inevitable miracle happens: Ariel actually meets a halfway-decent guy and finds herself having a nice, normal love life. She starts fabricating stories to maintain the kinky weirdness of her columns. Therein lies her journalistic ruin.

People either love Amy Sohn’s frank and candid approach to writing about sex and relationships, or they hate it. "Nobody seems to fall in the middle," says the 25-year-old first-time novelist. Luckily, Sohn counts her parents and current boyfriend among her supporters. “Female Trouble,” the New York Press column, has, she says, “worn in” the people who are close to her. When Run Catch Kiss was published, “they’d already developed the coping mechanisms they needed.” Sohn nevertheless insists that readers trying to puzzle out the autobiographical parts of her novel are wasting their time. “If the book was about an 8-year-old growing up on a farm in Iowa,” she says, “no one would care.” 

Sohn still has her columnist job and has moved on to screenwriting as well as novel-writing. Run Catch Kiss displays her sharp, sardonic wit and comic timing; there are numerous giggle-out-loud moments, such as when Ariel describes her new friend, Sara: “She’d been suicidal, bulimic, on Prozac, president of her temple youth group, knocked up, doped up, coked up, institutionalized, and a member of NA, OA, AA, and Phi Beta Kappa.” And there’s the night that Ariel, still living with her parents, dresses for a date in a black wig and a thrifted nurse costume hemmed to “ass-length.” “Cute hot, not slut hot,” she thinks. Her father catches sight of her as she heads out the door. “You look like one of the daughters from Fiddler on the Roof,” he laughs. “How ya doing, Chava? Why aren’t your legs covered?”

Sohn is a bold and honest storyteller, holding nothing back in her descriptions of Ariel’s bedroom encounters (or telephone encounters or movie-theater encounters), which is, at first, refreshing. But the lack of eroticism in the sex scenes make them grow tiresome; you can only talk about impersonal clutching and erect members for so long before your language loses its dramatic and rhetorical edge.

Not all worthwhile relationships have to be elegant and pretty, but they do need to get under the skin. Ariel herself yearns for intimacy, for “passion and companionship and deep discussion and compliments delivered to me regularly without any misgivings or posturing.” While her often fruitless search for love rings true for many, and might make a good newspaper column, it doesn’t have enough staying power for a novel. It’s a quick, steamy, amusing read, but ends abruptly and leaves readers with little to think about. It resembles just what many people aren’t looking for: a hasty, superficial lover who doesn’t stick around for breakfast. 

This review was originally published in Brown Alumni Magazine.