Bitch by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Author:Elizabeth Wurtzel [Wurtzel, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307829887
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

When the movie Quiz Show came out, dramatizing the young congressional attorney Richard Goodwin’s prosecution of the television game show riggings, I was mostly struck by a dark little corner of the movie—barely even a subplot—a small personal speck within a film that was otherwise notable mostly for its sweepingness, its big themes. I was struck by the character of Sandra Leverant, Goodwin’s Vassar girl and graduate student wife, played by Mira Sorvino, in what I thought was quite a star turn. In fact I thought that Mira, who had been a classmate of mine at Harvard, ought to have won an Oscar for her portrayal, and I rightly predicted, when she wasn’t even nominated, that it was only a matter of time before she did receive that honor (only a couple of years later, as Linda in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite).

Anyway, Sandra as movie character was only vaguely sketched, but she wore berets and accused her husband of being the “Uncle Tom of the Jews” when he seemed reluctant to press charges against Charles Van Doren, the handsome blond blue-blood who was deemed too elegant to drag into this muck, too heroic. Of course, Sandra is right, she is probably always right, and she becomes the moral center of a movie which is mostly about Goodwin’s frustration at his paper-pushing job and his attempt to kick up some dust and make a name for himself that is better suited to being number one in his class at Harvard Law. Meanwhile, he comes home to Sandra and finds her doing the crossword puzzle when she should be writing her dissertation, finds her using her obviously considerable intelligence—more considerable than his, it seems clear—mostly to set him straight, to question and criticize the probity of his crusade.

I mean, they are, after all, only game shows.

Well, anyway, I really liked her. I loved the way she would be doing crossword puzzles when she should have been doing serious intellectual work because, frankly, I am an obsessive doer of the daily puzzle, get the Times only for the crossword and spend a lot of time when I should be working just filling in those little boxes. And I liked the niche she had carved for herself in her marriage because I always believed it was what I, as a wife, would be best at: as someone who hides at home, writing what is on my mind and disengaged from the politics of business, of life or of politics themselves, I always thought I’d be good to come home to, a person to put things in perspective, to point out the stupidity of the pissing contests most men seem to find so engaging. For instance, I could say, if I married a studio executive, How stupid you are to give Jim Carrey $20 million for just one movie, and I could point out why these Faustian bargains never are worth it. Or if I were married to a Democratic pollster who was fretting over

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