NONFICTION - April 26, 1992

THE SECOND SEDUCTION by Frances Lear (Knopf: $20; 191 pp.). Perhaps the most liberating thing about big-time success is that it allows you to confess big-time failure: Once you are someone, you can admit having felt like no one; once you make it into the aristocracy, you can reveal the ways in which you have felt excluded, ashamed or different. In this elegant, intimate memoir, Frances Lear cashes in on this freedom in a big way.

A successful fashion executive who received a $112 million divorce settlement from Norman Lear in 1985, Frances now edits “Lear’s,” a successful magazine aimed primarily at older women. Were her name not on this book’s cover, though, you might think you were reading the diary of an incarcerated drug addict. Hailing suicide as “the only guaranteed, sure-fire way to end, blitz, detonate a critical mass of suffering,” she confesses that “When the time comes for the the bedroom shade to be lowered and the yogurt and its spoon placed on the bedside table with the lithium tablets and the Klonopin, there is nothing left in the universe of my consciousness except the fear of botching it.”

Fortunately, though, “The Second Seduction” is not so much a dour confessional as it is an attempt to gain control over painful memories by making them mere words on a page. Just as Lear’s magazine aims to show women that there is indeed life after marriage, divorce and menstruation, Frances Lear, as she writes on this book’s last page, hopes to “bring the curtain down. Fade to black. Close the play. Drop the series. Write something new. Open with act I, scene I. Make it a musical.”

Can she? The verdict is not in. On the one hand, her frustrations, particularly her resentment of “the power men have had over me,” seem too unresolved to be dismissed so blithely. On the other hand, her frequently waggish, almost mischievous writing style suggests that she has reduced many demons to mere caricatures. As she writes of her former boss at the Copacabana nightclub: “If anything was even an eighth of an inch out of place, he would roar like a jet taking off and swing his fat arms in the air, reducing us to dust.”