First published 2011
Wendy Wasserstein won the Tony Award as the first woman playwright to claim that honor. She wrote The Heidi Chronicles and other acclaimed works. Broadway knew her warm laugh and disheveled hair. Theater critics praised her plays. Friends filled her inner circle, including playwright Christopher Durang and Lincoln Center's André Bishop. Yet Wasserstein guarded her deepest secrets fiercely. At forty-eight, she rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital to deliver her daughter Lucy Jane three months early. Almost no one knew about the pregnancy. The father's identity remained unknown. Her siblings Sandra and Bruce achieved extraordinary success in corporate America and investment banking respectively. Their Polish immigrant parents Lola and Morris had raised five children in Brooklyn with grand ambitions. Behind this accomplished family lay private sorrows and carefully hidden struggles. When Wasserstein died just six years after becoming a mother, few people understood how sick she had been. Julie Salamon pieces together the fragmented story of a woman who spoke publicly about female experience during decades of social transformation while keeping her personal pain private.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Brooklyn, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
461 pages · Hardcover · Penguin Press