i don't know anything about wendy wasserstein. well, i wasn't her intended audience. but i can tell that the biography of wasserstein by judith salamon is a hagiography that would do anything to try to inflate wasserstein's importance. unfortunately, salamon keeps inflating it until it pops. so try this:
Years before Facebook existed, she “posted” updates on her life in essays published in newspapers and magazines. Before the concept of Internet identities existed, she created a public persona that seemed intimate but was carefully controlled.
yes, and two hundred years before that charles lamb did the same, and three hundred years before that, montaigne. between lamb and wasserstein, thousands. one of the most amazing achievements of montaigne was that he anticipated facebook. what appears most remarkable about wasserstein is that she anticipated sex and the city. by almost ten years. oy, the art! what remarkable prescience: like nietzsche, she was a premonition of the future. that the future sucked and was devastatingly conventional and superficial, and has now been canceled, makes no never mind. you might want to think for a second whether anyone had ever dealt with smart successful women in fiction before. judith salamon appears not to think so.
at any rate, in trying to sell her book by puffing up wasserstein, salamon issues a devastating indictment of wasserstein's work, and of salamon's own education and good sense.
