I notice them everywhere: Little pink guidebooks on how to be a "bad girl" or a "swell girl" or a girl who can "survive" on "three black skirts." Each is adorably illustrated with drawings of long-lashed girls in the big city. I've been lingering over displays of these hardbound confections, eyeing them at registers, fingering them when no one is looking. I'm drawn to these girl bibles with a mixture of attraction and repulsion, like a furtive pervert to a bicycle seat.

Maybe it is a case of repeated exposure leading to need. In 1999, we had Cynthia Rowley and Ilene Rosenzweig's "Swell: A Girl's Guide to the Good Life" and Cameron Tuttle's "The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road." In 2000, we had Tuttle's "The Bad Girl's Guide to Getting What You Want," Anna Johnson's "Three Black Skirts: All You Need to Survive" and Julia Bourland's "The Go-Girl Guide: Surviving Your 20s With Savvy, Soul and Style." This year brings advice from a fictional character, Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones's Guide to Life"; a power grrrl, Susan Jane Gilman's "Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a Smartmouth Goddess"; an archetypal throwback, Laren Stover's "Bombshell Manual of Style"; and a former Prozac waif turned difficult, naked "Bitch," Elizabeth Wurtzel's "Radical Sanity: Common Sense Advice for Uncommon Women."

"OK, I bought one," my friend Sarah admits over the phone. "I was depressed." By the time she confesses this, I am lost, up to my neck in a bathtub full of bubbles -- as suggested by at least three guide authors -- gorging on five books at once and starting to feel queasy.

Of course, there's an element of harmless narcissism that goes along with reading these books; everybody likes to read about herself, especially in the movie version. And there's something undeniably uplifting and, yes, empowering about the way they urge young, single women to live happily and creatively. But the same thing that makes the genre attractive is what makes it vaguely unsettling. The newer guides, though no doubt more enlightened than the old, share with them the assumption that single women still need instructions on how to be happy and creative on their own. There's something ultimately deflating about a guidebook that explains how to be cheerful and zany and eccentric, and something sad about a woman who buys one. It rings of "Oh, my God, I'm a single woman in a city." If she were just fine with that -- which the books say she should be -- why would she need to buy a manual? Regardless of the virtues of this latest batch of how-to manuals for single women, it's the continued existence of the genre itself, which has been around for at least 150 years, that is ultimately depressing.

At first glance, the genre's history seems to trace a gradual movement from hidebound dependence on men to eventual autonomy. But things are not that simple. Guides for "spinsters" in the late 1800s were more melancholic, but perhaps less hysterical and confused, than the new ones. In 1859, two years before the outbreak of the Civil War, it was assumed that an unmarried woman of 30 was finally emancipated from the eternal cycle of male-oriented thinking and domesticity and free to focus on other things, namely service to society. And while these visions of corseted old maids are not exactly uplifting, there's something liberating about the idea that unmarriageable women were encouraged to get over it -- and themselves -- and move on. The newer guides for city girls appear to be more enlightened -- they're much too sophisticated to deal in "tips on how to hook a man" and other such retro advice -- but in some ways, the feeling of single-girl desperation looms even larger despite, or because of, their keep-smiling, create-yourself aura.

For all their attitude, the new guides still dispense tips on how to cultivate an "intriguing personality" (code for marriageability) -- the most intriguing, these days, being the sort of eccentric, madcap spunkiness of Holly Golightly minus the prostitution, the bad past and the doomed future. So maybe she's Corie in "Barefoot in the Park." The "Bad Girl," for example, has at her disposal at least 10 good excuses for getting out of the office ("My toilet backed up, overflowed and flooded my whole apartment") and 10 suggestions for things to do with panty liners ("disposable gym slippers").

The girl with the three skirts has a list of things to do while alone and happy ("Dance naked in Ugg boots"), and of things to do when alone and sad ("Play music, commune with your spirit, cook a weird recipe, volunteer in a soup kitchen"). The "swell" girl tips her manicurist with confidence and knows her beluga from her osetra. She never takes her friends for granted but will, when pressed, buy a Sara Lee cheesecake, bisect it with dental floss, stuff it with warm blueberries and lie to these same friends about its origins. She remembers to "keep the lighting low. Garnish. Get rid of the evidence!"

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