Shiksa Goddess: Or, how I Spent My Forties » (Reprinted Edition)

Wendy Wasserstein is the author of the the plays Uncommon Women and Others, Isn’t It Romantic, The Sisters Rosensweig, An American Daughter, and The Heidi Chronicles, for which she received a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and of the books, Bachelor Girls and Shiksa Goddess. She was admired both for the warmth and the satirical cool of her writing; each of her plays and books captures an essence of the time, makes us laugh and leaves us wiser. Wendy Wasserstein was born in 1950 in Brooklyn and died at the age of 55. Her daughter, Lucy Jane, lives in New York.

Celebrated playwright and magnetic wit Wendy Wasserstein has been firmly rooted in New York's cultural life since her childhood of Broadway matinees, but her appeal is universal.

Book Magazine

Shoes, clothes, makeup, massages. Hiring a personal trainer. Lunch with Jamie Lee Curtis. These are some of the topics covered in this book, a compilation of magazine articles written in a breezy, splashy style by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wasserstein. Mildly funny, good-natured and ephemeral, these essays reveal that Wasserstein's overwhelming strength and weakness is the same: She is totally in touch with contemporary society. She knows its headlines, its diets, its real estate woes and its television shows. When Madeleine Albright discovered that she had Jewish roots, Wasserstein discovered, in the title essay, that she had Episcopalian ones, and set about acquiring a faded cardigan sweater, a thirty-year-old Saab and "a divorced asexual friend from Amherst." One of Wasserstein's best pieces is a tribute to her sister Sandra, an unsentimental business executive who died at sixty of breast cancer. That essay leads to the final, wonderful meditation in which the author's efforts to conceive (despite being single and forty-eight) result in a dangerous pregnancy, the birth of a tiny, premature daughter and enormous happiness.
—Penelope Mesic

(Excerpted Review)