This book is a retrospective of strip cartoons written by Roberta Gregory and published in the comic Naughty Bits between 1991 and 1999. The heroine of the series is Midge McCracken, otherwise known, for good reasons, as Bitchy Bitch. Midge is dysphoric, disappointed, desperate, and just plain bitchy. She is also racist, intolerant, and short tempered. She's even worse when she's premenstrual. Or poscoital. Or stuck in a traffic jam. She fights with the women in her office, she snarls at men who pester her for a relationship, she's mean to her mother. So why would anyone like her? There's something vulnerable about Midge, something that makes you hope things will work out for her, against all the evidence that things never get any better, and that lifean abortion, and of course fractious scenes from the office where Bitchy spends the day resentfully in the company of her infuriating colleagues.

In addition to Midge we get to meet the characters who populate Midge's life. There's her insufferably grumpy father who seems to spend his life tormented by dyspepsia, watching TV, and making pronouncements like "Reagan's getting the economy right". Midge's mother, herself a plastic beauty, is constantly thwarted in her attempts to teach Midge to be a "proper young woman". There's the lecherous and inadequate Kenny who just doesn't understand Midge at all. Then there's those office people. What a crew. Sylvie is a cloying new ager, always looking for new ways of controlling her negative energies, and the hilariously funny Marice, a southern Christian bigot