Wendy and the Lost Boys, Julie Salamon
I stayed up all night to finish this new (well, the first, really) biography of Wendy Wasserstein, and you should too. It's fantastic.
It also made me furious at the basic unfairness of the universe, obviously, that someone should be so talented and have a young child and be so full of generosity and warmth and interest in the world, and not get to live. And that female beauty carries such weight in our society; honestly, if a man possessed a comparable degree of physical attractiveness to Wendy Wasserstein, with that kind of creative prowess and professional success and kindness, he would be married to Meryl Streep. Not that Wendy Wasserstein didn't live a rich and full life, but if she had been male, she might have been beating women off with a stick.
Not that she lacked for utterly fascinating male companionship:
"She had so many husbands. She had a harem of husbands," Salamon says. They were the stars of the New York theater scene: Andre Bishop of Lincoln Center, playwrights Terrence McNally and Christopher Durang, director Gerry Gutierrez and critic Frank Rich.
Wendy and the Lost Boys is tremendously strong on Wasserstein's family, her secrecy, her entourage of devoted friends, her relationship with money and class, and the marvelous ambivalence of her plays. It's also one of those biographies that benefits from the double-edged sword of being written very soon after the subject's death, when you still have access to the individuals who knew her best – you really have to want to get it right, and Julie Salamon gets it right.
I'm dying to read this, after only having (to my shame) heard of Wendy Wasserstein in the last week or so. I've just read Frank Rich's obituary of her and am especially fascinated by the public/private dichotomy he brings up in relation to her own life:
"The Wendy Wasserstein who was always there for everybody (including me) at every crisis and celebration, the Wendy with that uproarious (yet musical) laugh and funny (yet never bitchy) dialogue for every fraught situation, the Wendy the whole world knew and adored was also an intensely private person who left many mysteries behind. Though she had countless circles of friends, the circles didn’t always overlap: her life was more compartmentalized than she let on. Though she had written a memorable memoir for The New Yorker about her personal and physiological journey to childbirth, the subject of her child’s paternity was strictly off-limits. Though it was apparent that she was ill for several years before her death, she hid the specifics and terminal gravity of her illness (lymphoma) until the endgame gave her away. By then she was out of reach of intimates who might have wanted to have a cognizant goodbye."
Something I found interesting from the NYT review of this book:
WW's mother "inflated [her] with ambition and undermined [her] with criticism…As a result the playwright struggled with a self-image that Ms. Salamon calls 'superior-inferior.'"
Can't wait to read it. Thanks for the mini-review!
Also: Julie Salamon. So awesome. The Devil's Candy, yes, but her last book which I think was called Hospital was also terrific.