My Little Red Book: Not What Mao Had In Mind

Ever wonder when Erica Jong got her period? Or how it was that Joyce Maynard's or Gloria Steinem's monthly "friend" showed up?

Unreal is one writer who, for the record, never wondered any such thing about any fellow scribe.

But now that there's a 240-page hardcover tome chronicling Aunt Flo's First Visit to women across the globe, well, we're is thinking about renewing the ol' library card.

After she got her period wearing a yellow bathing suit while water-skiing with her widowed grandfather, a mortified 18-year-old woman named Rachel Kauder Nalebuff decided to get off her Maxi pad and do something useful.   

Her resulting tome, My Little Red Book, came out last month and is currently the 158th best-seller at Amazon.com. We got the news from a blood-red ad on page two of yesterday's typically erudite New York Times Book Review.

A separate story in the Times relates that Nalebuff will matriculate at Yale University this fall. (Bet this rich project made for a great college essay!)

In the meantime she's on tour (no St. Louis dates yet) and running a lil' Web site, where women the world over can write in with their tales of the first time on the rag.

Here's Nalebuff waxing poetic on the project: