Jessica Weiner’s Good in Bed was an Olympian challenge to finish. The plot stands as “how I, a fat woman, from a dysfunctional family (of course), impregnated by a wimpy stupid mama’s boy lover, managed to sell my screen play to Hollywood through a Ladies Room encounter with a botoxed anorexic female Hollywood personality looking for an ersatz sister whom she will shower with a wardrobe and Orange County real estate, and oh yes, just to please the weepy-teary crowd, I produced a preemie daughter that the whole dysfunctional albeit rich doing nothing gang coo over thereby I grew as a person and found the meaning of life.” Ms Weiner has the most effusively chatty manner of casting herself as a Cinderella (or is it a pumpkin?) blessed by a glam fairy godmother and glass-slippered by a Jewish lawyer popping up conveniently and with distressing predictably at the end and – who knows – they might all end up with the babe in a split level in Greenwich? Chatty, alas, does not mean engaging, interesting or even amusing. The prose is adipose -”adiprose.” Ms Weiner monstrously embodies the axiom that form is meaning, and hers is especially stout and not a little gaseous. I lifted some clunkers from the text that abound with them – I am almost tempted to add like acne on an adolescent face, but that comparison would be Ms Weiner at her best, and I am not running for any crown in that category. The whole navel-gazing tissue of boredom pretends to be what exactly? A novel? A memoir? A confession.? However I soldiered valiantly on to the end, probably because I am becoming a cheap old dame and, yes, I kept hoping against hope that the scriptural vomit would somehow manage to produce the one scene, to make it all worth my tired eyes. Not to end on a negative, I had high hopes in Chapter One when Weiner gets word that her ex has written a bitter description for a magazine of his life with her, a plus size woman, and after rushing down her skyscrapered office in Philadelphia of all places to make a phone call to the bastard, she takes refuge in a bag of M and Ms, a marvelously comic opening alas left unexplored!
