Wendy Wasserstein Dies

Not long ago I reviewed the book Sloth by Wendy Wasserstein, an installment in Oxford University Press' series on the seven deadly sins. Unlike the others, Wasserstein chose a humorous approach, spoofing the ubiquitous self-help books we see everywhere. In January, Wasserstein died from complications of lymphoma.

Oxford University Press links to an obituary for Wasserstein in The New York Times:

Her heroines — intelligent and successful but also riddled with self-doubt — sought enduring love a little ambivalently, but they didn’t always find it, and their hard-earned sense of self-worth was often shadowed by the frustrating knowledge that American women’s lives continued to be measured by their success at capturing the right man. Ms. Wasserstein drew on her own experience as a smart, well-educated, funny Manhattanite who wasn’t particularly lucky in romance to create heroines in a similar mold, women who embraced the essential tenets of the feminist movement but didn’t have the stomach for stridency.

For Ms. Wasserstein, as for many of her characters and fans, humor was a necessary bulwark against the disappointments of life, and a useful release valve for anger at cultural and social inequities. Her work, which included three books of nonfiction and a forthcoming novel as well as about a dozen plays, had a significant influence on depictions of American women in the media landscape over the years: Heidi Holland, the steadily single, uncompromising heroine of “The Heidi Chronicles,” can be seen as the cultural progenitor of “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw. (Coincidentally, Sarah Jessica Parker, who starred in that HBO series, played a series of small roles in the original production of “The Heidi Chronicles.”)

Wasserstein accomplished a lot in her life and it’s sad that her life was cut so short.

 

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