SHIKSA GODDESS (2008)

The subtitle of this collection of essays from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Heidi Chronicles is ''Or, How I Spent My Forties.'' But ''Or, How I Paid the Mortgage'' might work too, since almost all Wasserstein's musings, including but not limited to airy observations about exercise, her cat, and dinner with Jamie Lee Curtis, were originally commissioned as magazine pieces, and many of them have the feeling of being inspired by word count rather than passion. The reflexively breezy Wasserstein is at her most affecting and vulnerable in her two most heartfelt pieces -- about the death of her adored older sister from cancer, and about the premature birth of her adored baby daughter, when the author was 48 and had all but given up on motherhood.