A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body

September 15, 2007
Weedman has an avid following for her gutsy plays and one-woman performances, but her bedrock claim to fame is her brief stint on The Daily Show. And if her confessions of painful gaffes with host Jon Stewart contain even a molecule of truth, its a wonder she lasted as long as she did. Weedman is of the hyperactively self-loathing school of comedy, in which women obsess about their bodies and offer audacious details. Need we say more than coffee enema? Weird bad sex? But Weedman isnt going for the merely gauche in her first collection of humorous autobiographical essays. For one thing, she is too fine a writer; for another, she has smart things to say about our failures to communicate at home and in the world. In tales about the breakdown of her marriage, her struggle to understand what it means to be adopted, her relationship with a widower and his teenage son, her follies abroad, and a hilarious misadventure in a thrift-store dress at the Emmies, Weedman uses raunchiness as a covert route to the heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)