'Sexual Life of Catherine M.,' 'Lunch in Paris'

Catherine Millet's last book, "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," caused a bit of a stir - the voyeuristic thrill of nodding sagely as we watch another open relationship go up in smoke and too many mirrors. So Millet is pushing her luck with a sequel, "Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M." (translated from the French by Helen Stevenson, Grove, $23). We get to watch her writhe and rip her hair out when she finds herself actually in love enough (or is it love?) to be obsessively jealous.

All snarkiness aside, you have to admire her willingness (reminiscent of memoirs by Simone de Beauvoir and Annie Ernaux) to show herself raw - to gaze and gaze into the holy navel until she finds something we might all actually learn from (or not). Millet meets Jacques when she is 24. She discovers a letter (no!) revealing the depth of his involvement with someone else. Trouble with open relationships, she writes, is "that you are not the only one who has a special relationship with them" (no!).

I admire her self-esteem and her lack of self-esteem, both. We turn away from the childishness and ugliness of jealousy and the incompleteness it reveals. It's hard, unless you're Chauncey Gardiner, to watch.

To stimulate a violent mood swing, read "Jealousy" and then Elizabeth Bard's frothy confection of a memoir, "Lunch in Paris: A Love Story With Recipes" (Little, Brown, $23.99).

Ask yourself which head you'd rather live in: Millet's tortured, desperate search for pleasure or Bard's la-di-da. Bard is a self-confessed multi-tasking, tightly coiled, New York worrier. Not the girl "who swings from the chandeliers and screws men because she can, fixing her lipstick in the rearview mirror of a cab hailed at dawn" - instead she's the "girl you call Wednesday for Saturday."

There's a bit of self-deception going on here, since she ends up sleeping with the handsome Gwendal about 30 seconds after she meets him. Their affair begins with deftly made mint tea and matures into profiteroles, tagines and macaroons. They marry in 2003. A friend worries about her declining ambitions: "You can't spend the rest of your life at the market," the friend tells Bard. "I didn't have the courage to say it out loud just yet," Bard thinks, "but a tiny voice popped up inside me: why not?"

Bit of a downer, actually. Turns out all that pain and jealousy, mint tea and tagines aren't, strictly speaking, necessary. In her new book, "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" (W.W. Norton, $24.95), evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett explains how instincts that may have served us 10,000 years ago are no longer useful. We try to fill false needs with super-sized symbols of power (atomic weapons), frantic permutations on sex and, well, sugary foods (seems like excessive weight gain may be the lesser evil here).

Barrett recommends willpower (just say no to candy and leaders who tell us we have to kill people in other countries). Listening to our instincts and doing what makes us happy, contrary to popular opinion, are not the reliable way to do the right thing.

The eight burnished stories in "Ghosts of Wyoming" (Graywolf, $15 paper) confirm Alyson Hagy's importance in American literature; her seamless blending of landscape and lives, her very modern understanding of the vulnerability of kindness. It is of course terrifying to think that a life can be reduced to metaphor, as in her story "Brief Lives of the Trainmen": "He tucks his belongings under one arm and shimmies open the boxcar door. The morning smells of mule and tar. The surveyors' tents, set like a widow woman's teacups on the flat plain to the south, are barely visible against the chalky soil he can taste when the wind blows his way."

But Hagy doesn't so much reduce as pare away the back story, the ancestry, the potential to reveal a moment to which a character brings everything. In "The Border," for example, the boy who steals a dog is so much more: a human running from cruelty, whose life is continually "sent backward." Metaphor works so well in the western landscape - all that space where it can run itself out. In the East, it can seem jarring as metaphors ricochet off a more cluttered, suburban stage set. Hagy's writing is stylized but still rings true. Echoes, in fact.