The Shiksa Goddess

When the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright turned 40, she made a To Do List, most of which repeated the items she had listed when she turned 30: lose weight, become a better citizen, move, fall in love, and-at the very end-decide about a baby. InShiksa Goddess-her first book of essays in ten years-Wendy Wasserstein takes on these and other midlife quests and obsessions with her famous, appealing humor. She writes about diets and cooking, the theater, attending the Golden Globes. Chekhov and George Abbott, hiring a personal trainer("Sue is a fat-free beam of light"), and the surprising truth about her denominational heritage. She recounts the rise of the legendary Mrs. Entenmann, the salesgirl who married the boss at 19 and became czarina of the metropolitan strudel. She describes her mother's notion of holiday tradition: "Lola Wasserstein encourages sending a homemade Mother's Day greeting card. A personal citation like Mother. I promise you next year to be married with three musically inclined children, a co-op, and a degree in dentistry is worth a thousand words. And she gives us two longer, deeply moving essays: about her sister's battle with breast cancer, and about her own pregnancy at the age of 48 and the birth of her first child, Lucy Jane.