By Angela Watercutter
The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO - She's 15 minutes late.

But the author of the The Bad Girl's Guide to the Party Life is allowed, if not encouraged, to be fashionably late. And like a proper hostess, Cameron Tuttle breezes into Bacar restaurant and bar in San Francisco's South of Market district, apologizes for her tardiness and orders a drink.

Party Life is Tuttle's third guide for female fun. It offers yet another humorous glimpse into the wild world of sass, brass and wicked ways.

The book is a hodgepodge of tip-sheets, flow charts and doodles designed to instruct even the most timid woman in how to have a good time.

Help yourself

In Tuttle's world, there is no self-help - just helping yourself. And her three Bad Girls Guides offer practical, fun advice for surviving life. But between the pink, glittery covers, Tuttle leaves little room for morning-after shame.

"Little did I know I was tapping into this real zeitgeist," says Tuttle, holding a flute of champagne and chatting at a small table near the bar. "This whole good girl-bad girl conflict is not just my own neurosis, but it's actually a very universal thing for women. It really blows my mind."

In the summer of 1996, after renting a video of Thelma and Louise for the umpteenth time, Tuttle and a friend trekked 120,000 miles across the country and back - stopping in nearly every state along the way.

In 1999, she wrote The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road. The book, which has sold 223,000 copies, touted itself as the "read-it-before you leave, toss-it-in-the-glove-compartment, use-it-if-you-run-out-of-toilet-paper handbook."

It offered every suggestion imaginable for surviving road trips, such as how to talk your way out of a speeding ticket without crying. It also served more practical advice such as how to fix a muffler or cool an overheating engine.

Her follow-up, The Bad Girl's Guide to Getting What You Want, sold 330,000 copies, outpacing the original, and allowed Tuttle to quit her day job running her own copywriting business.

Tuttle also wrote The Paranoid's Pocket Guide, which was released by Chronicle Books in 1997.

Party Life came out in August and seems destined for the same success: It sold 93,000 copies in its first four months of release.

"On one level, I'm absolutely delighted and surprised with the success of these books," Tuttle says. "On another level, there's a part of me that intuitively sensed there was something here and that there would be a lot of women who would respond to an open invitation to unleash their inner wild."

But some readers question whether the books are advocating that women objectify themselves instead of using their intelligence.

However, Tuttle, a self-styled bad girl, says being a bad girl isn't just about being sexy, it's about empowering yourself, going after what you want and having a sense of humor.

"You know there are so many books out there that tell women what to do, or how to improve their lives, and they're so serious," Tuttle says. "Having a healthy sex life is going to be part of a healthy bad girl existence, but it's not about dressing like a slut and sleeping around. That's pretty unimaginative as far as I'm concerned."

For every woman

The guides, which cost about $15, are mostly geared toward single women in their 20s and 30s. But Tuttle says she hopes women of every age, sexual orientation and marital status can gain something from them.

The author grew up in the Bay Area town of Lafayette, Calif., where her father, Norman Tuttle, was a lawyer and at one point mayor. Her mother, Barbara Tuttle, was a stay at home mom who died when Tuttle was in her teens.

Tuttle says much of her inspiration for writing the bad girl's guides can be traced to her mother, who she says never felt fulfilled by just being a mother and wife. By the time she died of breast cancer at 40, Barbara Tuttle had done none of the things she had yearned to do, such as moving away from the suburbs, making her own money or really speaking her mind.

Tuttle says she wanted to write something that would inspire women not to fall into the good girl trap her mother did.