NONFICTION - Aug. 1, 1993

DANCING THROUGH LIFE IN A PAIR OF BROKEN HEELS by Mickey Guisewite, illustrated by Cathy Guisewite. (Bantam: $14.95, 210 pp.) Anyone who reads the comics knows Cathy Guisewite, creator of the “CATHY” comic strip, an arch little look at the modern woman syndicated in over 1,000 newspapers worldwide. Now Guisewite is in cahoots with her younger, thinner, prettier, happily married sister Mickey (we get this description in Cathy’s foreword), an advertising creative type with a yen for--well, what are these stories, actually? They aren’t fiction. They’re brief little essays on the state of the world--a world where daughter spends money on compost when mom used leaves and grass clippings, which were free; where shopping patterns are gender specific and there is no such thing as enough black shoes; where no one in the world has time for a decent lunch. Guisewite the scribe uses a “can you imagine “ tone that verges on the monotonous. She is neither angry, nor idiosyncratic enough to carry an entire volume. Given her sister’s popularity, lots of people will grab this book and get a chuckle here, or a chortle there, but probably not a sustained howl.