Ever since the legendary Elle advice columnist E Jean Carroll appeared on the cover of New York magazine wearing the same (unwashed) Donna Karen coatdress she wore when Donald Trump allegedly forced himself on her 24 years ago in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, she has been at the hot center of the Trump-obsessed news cycle.

New York excerpted the section of her new memoir in which Carroll vividly, and I think believably, describes her encounter with Trump: after a friendly flirtation, she writes, he suddenly pinned her against the wall of a dressing room, pulled down her tights and forcibly penetrated her with his penis. Carroll managed to break free and run. The president has denied the accusation, claiming in his usual insulting, sexist way that Carroll is “not my type”.

Carroll has resisted using the word rape to describe what she says Trump did to her. She says she has a variety of reasons for this, including that she doesn’t want to be viewed as a victim. Instead, she characterizes the encounter as a “colossal struggle” and a “fight”. She told two friends after it happened, who have confirmed her story to the New York Times. For years, like so many women, she blamed herself.

The whole female sex seems to agree that men are becoming a nuisance E Jean Carroll

This mincing of words reveals a now familiar feminist faultline between some baby boomers’ view of what constitutes sexual assault and millennials, less tolerant of men-will-be-men. As Carroll, 75, told Vanity Fair’s Keziah Weir: “I’m a member of the silent generation, remember. World War II was going on when I was born. Whoa. I speak for many women my age. Chin up. Move on. Here I come. Watch out and laugh. That’s how we do things. We don’t yammer about it.”

But wherever you land on “rape” v “fight”, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal is an entertaining and rage-making romp of a read. A cross between Lucile Ball and Annie Oakley, Auntie E, as her Elle readers call her, is a fearless, madcap journalist whose breezy, bubbly writing style is a pleasure to read.

This is in part a road book but our protagonists, instead of Thelma and Louise, are Carroll and Lewis, her poodle. Carroll lives alone in an upstate New York house painted white with black stripes. She left her cat, Vagina T Fireball, behind with a friend. Her car, a Prius bought secondhand for $6,000 and hand-painted with blue polka dots and green frogs, is named Miss Bingley, for the mean girl in Pride and Prejudice. Are you getting a sense of Auntie E’s special eccentricities?

Carroll had planned to write about driving around the US, visiting towns named for women – Bonnieville, Kentucky; Pocahontas, Missouri; Tallulah, Louisiana – and asking a satirical question: “Ladies! What do we need men for?”

The premise derived from Carroll’s observation, after 25 years writing her column, that most female correspondents’ problems were caused by “lads” and “chaps”.

“The whole female sex seems to agree that men are becoming a nuisance with their lying, cheating, robbing, perjuring, assaulting, murdering, voting debauchers on to the supreme court, threatening one another with intercontinental ballistic nuclear warheads, and so on,” Carroll pronounces on page one in the first of many flamboyant adjectival lists.

The plan changed. On the first day, the Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story and #MeToo was born. Carroll’s road trip morphed into a drive down the memory lane of the bad guys in her life.

If Carroll had a tattoo for every time she was fondled or attacked by a ‘chap’, she would look like a Maori warrior

The former Miss Cheerleader USA and Miss Indiana University has become, according to Vox’s latest count, the 22nd woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault. The president is No 20 of 21 on Carroll’s The Most Hideous Men of My Life List. And hideous, cruel and criminal these men certainly are.

Layered between Carroll’s road trip, childhood and career stories (she wrote for Esquire, Outside, Rolling Stone, New York, Playboy and Saturday Night Live) are bone-chilling descriptions of monsters like No 6, Old Cam the camp counselor who repeatedly molests her “even in the dining room during dinner, under the table, squeezing my thighs, shoving his fingers – saying, ‘You’re my girl. You’re my girl’ and making me promise ‘not to tell anyone’”. She was 12.

There’s No 7, the babysitter’s boyfriend who makes her pull down her pants and fondles her “guinea” while the babysitter watches.

No 1 is an Indiana University student who drives her into the woods and tries to rape her at knifepoint. She barely escapes.

“The jolly octopus”, No 15, is disgraced former CBS chief executive Less Moonves, who mashes her in a hotel elevator after she interviews him for Esquire.

“I don’t know how many apertures and openings you possess, Ladies, but Moonves, with his arms squirming and poking and goosing and scooping and pricking and pulling and prodding and jabbing, is looking for fissures I don’t even know I own, and – by God! – I am not certain that even if I pull off one of his arms, it won’t crawl after me and attack me in my hotel bed. Hell, I am thrilled I escape before he expels his ink!”

If Carroll had a tattoo for every time she was insulted, fondled or attacked by a “chap”, she would look like a Maori warrior.

Despite Carroll’s preternatural fortitude, this is a harrowing read. She won’t admit it, but it seems her encounter with Trump stopped her in her tracks.

She admits she hasn’t had sex since then: “The desire for desire was over. It was just pretty much dead.”

Some scars can’t be whitewashed with good cheer. The past always finds a way to come back and bite you, as Auntie E puts it, in the “fanny”. It seems “Chin up. Move on” isn’t always the advice that works, even for this ever-positive columnist.