Maybe this shouldn’t be such a surprise. There has come to be something of a cottage industry in self-effacing memoirs and pseudo-memoirs (just look at Bridget Jones), and such self-recriminating asides as Horn’s “Don’t sleep with musicians, Don’t sleep with musicians” could fit into a half-dozen contemporary books. Female writers of a certain age, it seems, have moved beyond anger but we’re not yet accepting of happiness. The result: a shared bitter laugh, and if there’s a bit of a silver lining (or flash of self-knowledge), so much the better.

Horn fits this burgeoning category to a T, musing, “Maybe my last viable decade is already, irrevocably over.” When not lamenting her tummy or the new lines on her face, she describes herself as so paralyzed by some combination of failure and anticipatory grief that all she can do is watch TV and chat on line, usually with friends and anonymous chat buddies even more screwed up than she herself is. Interspersed with her failings (at work, where her EchoNYC Web site is hemorrhaging money, or in love, which evades her) and her worries about her cats, who need constant shots and hydration, are her worries about the future. Even fiction feeds her misery: comparing herself to a minor character in War and Peace, she becomes first agitated at that character’s dismissal, and then increasingly despondent. “Sonya feels. For over a thousand pages she feels. . . . I hate them all.”

Her anxiety extends all the way to the grave. In between her chatty episodic chapters (usually titled “death,” “music,” or “cats”) sit Q&A-style interviews with elderly people. In these she asks men and women 30 and 40 years her senior such questions as “What are the main differences between the old you and the young you?” and “What would you like to experience one last time?” That her reflections are usually grimmer than theirs adds to the humor, if also to the sadness. (It is also worth noting that in the conversational style of this book, which favors nonchalance over physical description, the interspersed interviews provide some of the most moving depictions of other people.)

What saves Waiting is what saves the best of these pity-me books: there is something fundamentally desperate and desperately funny about contemporary urban life, and Horn often nails it. Unlike her worst fantasies (or more depressed elderly friends), the writer has a sharp sense of just how black she can get, pulling us back from the pit with a dry insight, a funny revelation (the chapter about her crush on Rubén Blades, for example), or a touching cat story, of which there are many, Veets and Beams being quite adorable characters. “When is someone going to love me who isn’t a cat?” asks Horn. Probably more of us have asked that question than would admit it in print.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention here that St. Martin’s is publishing my book on women and cats next year, and that my own cat died this winter. Which is probably what drew me to this book when I heard the title, and before I knew the publisher. And rather than concluding that St. Martin’s has an unhealthy interest in women and their cats, I think it’s safe to assume that more than a few of us have figured out what Stacy Horn and I have: those of us who adopted cats as freewheeling single women in our 20s and 30s and who are now heeling perilously close to middle age are experiencing mortality through our pets. This may be the last unexplored rite of passage. Until now.

Or is it? For one of the few flaws in this otherwise breezy read is its rather sudden conclusion, in which the author not only adopts a new kitten but also (and less believably) comes to terms with her own fear of death. By this point we’ve come to know her and wish her well, but as much as we hope for this resolution, it seems a bit pasted-on. Is Horn really content with the numbing of age, or has denial and wishful thinking simply dulled her usually sharp prose? Maybe the point is moot. Tolstoy she isn’t, but for urban woman of a certain age, she hits the spot.