5 ideas
The solemn, taxonomic apparatus of high cultural criticism, used on something so fleeting and unserious, shows how much of that criticism's authority comes from its form rather than its subject. The parody works as evidence that intellectual prestige can be manufactured by style alone.
Lebowitz defends sleep as the superior state of being, calling it 'death without the responsibility.' Waking life consists of demands, appointments and other people, while sleep is the one socially sanctioned way to be absent from all of them. Her praise of indolence doubles as a critique of a culture that treats constant activity as virtue.
Lebowitz weighs children the way one would rate a dinner guest or a purchase: by adult standards of conversation, usefulness and manners. On that scale children earn credit for things like asking better questions than adults. They lose points for failings such as rarely being in a position to lend you money. Refusing the sentimental exemption that children usually get exposes how much of our regard for them is convention rather than evaluation.
Lebowitz treats the telephone as a device that lets anyone claim your attention whenever they choose. It offers the intimacy of contact without the costs of hospitality, which she sums up as a way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink. Seen this way, a technology sold as connection is really a transfer of control over your time to whoever is calling.
The book's comic engine is to take one fastidious urbanite's preferences and announce them as binding etiquette, turning private irritation into mock-legislation. Fads, enthusiasms and self-improvement schemes are judged against that invented rulebook and found ridiculous. The overstatement exposes how arbitrary the collective standards of fashion already are.