Here's the tough trick about adulthood for me -- divided loyalties. I want everyone I love to love one another. And when I dislike someone, I want those who love me to dislike that person, too. Which means that I should dislike anyone disliked by those I love. Talk about ignorant armies clashing by night.

It's just not possible. So I've turned it around, accepted F.Scott Fitzgerald's dictum about the first-rate mind's ability to hold two conflicting thoughts, and learned to understand that someone I adore may strike someone else as boorish or high-handed.

So I was philosophical about encountering, in a biography of Stephen Sondheim, a depiction of Jean Kerr as a humorless, chain-smoking tough cookie. After all, I never actually knew Jean Kerr. But, growing up with her books, I thought I did.

Last night, I realized we had two copies of "The Snake Has All the Lines," so I weeded out the paperback copy for the giveaway pile. Spent much of the morning lost in it. There was the "Can This Romance Be Saved?" parody, about Lolita and Humbert, which sent me searching for the novel that inspired it when I was only 11 or 12. And there was the eternally useful: "How to Cope with Bad Notices."

"If he has the heart to leave the house during this period, the writer will be forced to assume an air of hearty optimism if only because he doesn't want to contribute to his own bad word of mouth. At the same time he must be warned that any acquaintance who says, 'Sam, I didn't read the notices, how were they?' has in fact read everything, including that one-line reference in Winchell. The way to deal with this character is to mystify him. Say, 'Frankly, I was pretty relieved.' Let _him_figure out what you're so relieved about."

At some point, it becomes impossible to know if a beloved writer from one's youth "holds up." I think Kerr's pieces do. Like Erma Bombeck, there was a smart and somewhat pissed-off woman beneath the whimsy. (Jean Kerr on her nightly battle with school lunches: "I'm an unfit mother and a rotten housekeeper, as shiftless and improvident as a character of out 'God's Little Acre.'")

God's Little Acre, Vance Packard, Winchell, Lanvin-Castillo (still don't know what that's a reference to) The Bridge on the River Kwai -- most of these references were mysterious to me at 12. Could a 20-something find anything to love about Jean Kerr?

And is there a writer from your youth that you love dearly that you suspect wouldn't hold up to your friends' scrutiny?

P.S. Does anyone want a hard-loved copy of "The Snake Has All the Lines"?