To judge by Katie Roiphe’s previous work, ambivalence and vulnerability aren’t qualities that she holds in high esteem. But in “The Power Notebooks,” she deigns to give them a try.

Ever since the 1993 publication of “The Morning After,” in which a 25-year-old Roiphe derided “feminist preoccupations with rape and sexual harassment” on college campuses, she has taken care to position herself as a feminist of a particular kind: tough but not radical, assertive but not militant, cool but not cold.

A woman, in other words, who is consummately aware of the male gaze and finds it only empowering, never degrading. Her more polemical books extol danger, charisma, virility and bravado while ridiculing safety, tenderness, solidarity and weakness. In an essay for The New York Times Book Review 10 years ago, she wrote about how much she missed the “sexual adventuring” of novels by Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and John Updike; the roaring misogyny of their work was more forgivable than the tentative output of younger male novelists burdened by “convoluted, post-feminist second-guessing.”

This new book, Roiphe says, is “like nothing else I have ever written.” Instead of essays, she offers notebook entries, discrete blocks of text organized around themes such as “Insomnia,” “Photographs” and “Twitter.” The notebooks allow her to express the “confusion, self-contempt, conflict” that she tried to keep at bay in her published work. “I craved a kind of wandering not available to me in the increasingly rigid forms of my life,” she writes. “I wanted a way out of my usual way of looking at things.”

Despite her reputation for controversy, Roiphe has never been that formidable a polemicist; her perspective is too blinkered, her blind spots too obvious. At the level of the sentence, though, she’s a skillful writer. Even in this book, without the ballast of a sustained argument, there’s a deliberation in her pacing that keeps everything moving.

She wants to explore the subject of “women strong in public, weak in private.” She’s especially fascinated by the example of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy — women who projected indomitable personas on the page even as they were in thrall to men who could be monstrous. “Is there a particular kind of abjection that some of us are drawn to, participate in, possibly romanticize,” Roiphe asks, “even though nothing about our external lives necessarily suggests it?”

For her, the answer is decidedly yes. Her first husband was emotionally abusive, even if Roiphe says that she’s hesitant to use the term. Her current husband experienced sudden rages because of a Vicodin addiction that he kept hidden from her for months. She once dated a manipulative man she calls “the Claw,” whose “brutality is, on a good day, part of his allure.”

The best parts of the book are the ones in which Roiphe reconsiders her old positions, admitting how much they left out. At 15, she had what she calls a “relationship” with a rabbi in his 30s and spent years afterward trying “to wrangle power, to claim my active participation, to clamber for it.” She now recognizes this was an elaborate defense mechanism, a “costly fiction” that elided her confusion by pretending she was in control.

Her newfound openness only goes so far. While Roiphe’s empathetic imagination extends to men and to women such as Beauvoir, who were tormented by the men they loved, other women in this book aren’t afforded the same depth of understanding. A female colleague at work is cast as a flattened caricature of a petty bully; a female friend gets gently mocked for her forthrightness and emotional candor, which Roiphe inexplicably characterizes as “her need to be protected.”

Throughout her career, Roiphe has maintained a tortured relationship to victimhood, scornful of women who speak at Take Back the Night marches while also expressing utter bewilderment when others criticize her work. In “The Power Notebooks,” she recalls being on the receiving end of a Twitter mob, getting called hateful names by people who were “angry about something they imagine might be in an essay I am writing in Harper’s that hasn’t yet come out.” She became scared and irritable, unable to sleep for more than three hours a night.

The experience must have been awful, though her account is fastidiously curated, neglecting to mention that the “something they imagine might be in an essay I am writing” was the name of Moira Donegan, who anonymously started a Google spreadsheet of men in the media accused of sexual harassment and assault.

Two years ago, when all of this was happening, Roiphe gave a muddled account to the Times, saying she didn’t know who created the list, even though the reporter obtained email exchanges suggesting otherwise. Roiphe then insisted that she wouldn’t have named Donegan “without her approval.” Here, in Roiphe’s new book, Donegan’s existence isn’t acknowledged at all; instead the entire ordeal revolves around Katie Roiphe, a beleaguered truth teller under attack solely for her daring ideas.

So who is she writing for? I began to wonder if this book is Roiphe’s attempt to be “relatable” — to jump on the bandwagon of fragmented, diaristic writing by women that confesses to vulnerability and doubt. In 2020, ingratiating oneself to a shrinking cadre of male gatekeepers is no longer the shrewd strategy it once was. “The Power Notebooks” can be read as a power move.