About book Wendy And The Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life Of Wendy Wasserstein (2011)
I have never seen one of Wendy Wasserstein's plays, but it didn't matter. This was one of the rare biographies where I felt that the author really got beneath the public persona of her subject and provided me with some interesting insights. Ms. Salamon accomplished this without the benefit of interviews with Wendy Wasserstein, as she didn't begin her research until a couple of years after Wendy's death, although she no doubt had access to Wendy's wide circle of friends. The result is not only a fascinating portrait of a complex person, but of the milieu in which she lived. I found it to be an absorbing read. "Wendy and the Lost Boys" is a fascinating biography that ferrets out some of the secrets and sorrows that Wendy Wasserstein hid beneath her giggly, lovably self-deprecating public persona. In some respects, Wasserstein was a typical Baby Boomer woman, breaking the glass ceiling in the '70s, giving up her bohemian roots and becoming part of the Establishment during the '80s and '90s, etc. In other respects, she was completely atypical. Her parents, siblings, friendships, and romantic relationships were all far more complicated than she ever revealed to the public, either in her plays (which were often semi-autobiographical) or her magazine essays.Julie Salamon tells this story capably, bringing to life the vivid "cast of characters" that made up Wendy's world. Many of Wasserstein's famous friends, such as Christopher Durang and André Bishop, spoke to Salamon and provided valuable insights. (Dishiest piece of gossip: around the time "The Heidi Chronicles" was on Broadway, Wendy had a lengthy affair with Terrence McNally -- though McNally was gay, and had formerly been Edward Albee's boyfriend!)Salamon's writing shows some signs of fatigue in the later chapters of the book -- lots of one-sentence paragraphs, things like that. Nevertheless, the final chapters are surprisingly suspenseful, as Wendy has a "mystery" baby and then a "mystery" illness, all within the last six years of her too-short life. Her secretiveness about the pregnancy and about her baby's father is mirrored by her secretiveness about the lymphoma that killed her. If this were a play, you might not believe it -- but this is Wendy's uncommon life.
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I have to say that I fell in love with Wendy Wasserstein while reading this book -
—xXSweetNotesXx
Informative, compelling, and moving. Commended even to casual Wasserstein fans!
—Lbosco
