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. Shiksa Goddess collects thirty-five of her urbane, inspiring, and deeply empathic essays–all written when she was in her forties, and all infused with her trademark irreverent humor. The full range of Wasserstein’s mid-life obsessions are covered in this eclectic collection: everything from Chekhov, politics, and celebrity, to family, fashion, and real estate. Whether fretting over her figure, discovering her gentile roots, proclaiming her love for ordered-in breakfasts, lobbying for affordable theater, or writing tenderly about her very Jewish mother and her own daughter, born when she was forty-eight and single, Wasserstein reveals the full, dizzying life of a shiksa goddess with unabashed candor and inimitable style.

In plays such as Isn't It Romantic, Uncommon Women and Others, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy Wasserstein put her finger on the pulse of her past-modern, post-feminist sisters and delivered her diagnosis with shrewd good humor and an unerring sense of the absurd. That same engaging sensibility bubbles through the twenty-nine essays in Bachelor Girls, in which Wasserstein presents her observations on: -- Boyfriends -- "The worse the boyfriend, the more stunning your American Express bill." -- Role Models -- "In the forties emulating an ideal woman meant bobbing your hair like Betty Grable's. In the eighties, because of Jessica Lange, women have to get a Pulitzer Prize-winning actor-playwright to fall in love with them, have a child by one of the world's great dancers, be nominated for two Academy Awards, and enjoy doing the laundry alone on a farm." -- Success -- "I knew my friend Patti was a big-time Hollywood agent the first time I saw her dial a telephone with a pencil." Ranging from the dietary secrets of lemon mousse to the politics of the second marriage, with stopovers at a bar mitzvah in Westchester, a chess tournament in Rumania, and a Tokyo production of Isn't It Romantic, Bachelor Girls is pure Wasserstein, which is to say, pure joy. From the Trade Paperback edition.