You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Mike Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm here this week with Wendy Wasserstein,

the author of most recently Bachelor Girls

and the playwright who wrote The Heidi Chronicles,

Isn't It Romantic and Uncommon Women and Others?

These pieces, humorous essays, were done as a response to an invitation to do a

magazine column. Yes, I was writing a column for a magazine called New York Woman, and it was basically

anything I wanted to write about, and so it became that. Did you feel any initial anxiety about appearing in prose?

Oh my God, enormous anxiety.

Terrible anxiety, actually.

One, because I would be writing from a personal point of view, and I thought, Wendy, who cares?

And two, that I was writing in a woman's magazine also. And so I knew there would also be

things about fashion and makeup and things like that, which I know very little bit about. So I thought

in a way it was amusing that I would actually be writing about such things. But I think it was also

how I write is how people talk and very little to do with prose.

I certainly wasn't a very good English student.

So, yeah, I was terrified of it, actually, to be frank.

But you nevertheless have developed an eye.

...