SHIKSA GODDESS (OR, HOW I SPENT MY FORTIES): Essays

##### SHIKSA GODDESS (OR, HOW I SPENT MY FORTIES): Essays.

By Wendy Wasserstein. Knopf. 235 pages. $23

Wasserstein is allegedly a humorist, but the centerpiece of this collection of "essays," as her publisher boldly calls them, is a self-absorbed psychodrama about her grim struggle to conceive and give birth on the brink of the menopause. It’s a case of life imitating art. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles, a play about a middle-aged, intellectual spinster who suddenly decides to become a single mother, Wasserstein, 40, decided to have a baby of her own.

At first she tried to do it the old-fashioned way. "I began studying fertility brochures and showed them to the man I was currently involved with." A real seductress, this girl. When, for some strange reason, her lover fled, she turned to sperm catalogs to find a partner in artificial insemination. But she flunked the fertility tests, so she took drugs to stimulate her flagging ovaries and tried in vitro with "an old and dear friend" as sperm donor. Fate, though, thwarted her again: When she had six egg-and-sperm combos on ice and a surrogate mother lined up, her doctor told her—so help me, I copied this correctly—"Your eggs are scrambled. They were not properly packed or frozen. We cannot proceed."

But we must. This was a project, and every grad student knows what that means: You have to finish it and turn it in at the end of the trimester or you won’t get credit. Abandoning the surrogacy plan, Wasserstein replenished her supply of embryos and had herself implanted with them until, eight years after she started trying, she finally got pregnant at the age of 48. The account of the rest of her ordeal has all the elements of a Lifetime Channel movie set in an obstetrics ward: women in perpetual states of self-discovery, female bonding in the sisterhood of the stirrups, the noble African-American mother in the next bed, one life-threatening emergency after another, and no kidney stone left unturned.

Wasserstein’s baby, weighing less than two pounds and afflicted with various lung and brain problems, was delivered by caesarean in the sixth month and had to remain in an incubator for three months. But the infant lived, and the book carries the de rigueur single-motherhood blurb: "Wendy Wasserstein lives in New York City with her daughter, Lucy Jane."

Wasserstein calls her writing "satiric," but she never goes for the jugular when the jocular will do. The title essay, in which she gives herself WASP roots to match Hillary Clinton’s claim to Jewish roots, is a heavy-handed riff, full of trite Aryan-from-Darien stereotypes long since run into the ground by Philip Roth and Gail Parent. What passes for humor here is the fluffed-up agony of women’s magazines, where many of these pieces originally appeared, or brittle New York smart talk involving name-dropping, place-dropping, and label-dropping. Lunch with Jamie Lee Curtis, dinner with Tom Brokaw; Armani this, Russian Tea Room that; Bottega Veneta bags here, Plaza Hotel there; and a bizarre story about using votive candles for shoe trees, "which accidentally burned my Manolo Blahnik pumps." Even the baby has an "Isolette-brand incubator."

Wasserstein seemingly considers herself a cultural leader, but she comes across as the kind who leads where everybody is already going. She talks the talk about liberation and self-determination, yet she follows every fad.

—Florence King