cover image Confessions of a Pretty Lady: Stories True and Otherwise

Confessions of a Pretty Lady: Stories True and Otherwise

Sandra Bernhard. HarperCollins Publishers, $14.95 (133pp) ISBN 978-0-06-015929-0

Bernhard, an actress-comedienne whose brassy humor attracts a cult-like following, here offers a semiconfessional view of her life's landscape. Childhood memories of her father, a doctor, and her mother, an artist, are warmly rendered in scenes of the Jewish family amiably accommodating itself to the Christmas season, and of the obligatory communal vacations joined by colorful relatives. The abrupt transition to a flamboyant denizen of ``downtowns,'' Los Angeles or New York, to an existence as a character in the lives of marginal people, is evoked in sharply satirical terms, in a melange of humorous fact and fiction, monologues akin to those that make Bernhard an icon of pop culture. The episodic snatches of quasi-autobiography, while less than illuminating, do reveal an underside, a hitherto undisplayed youthful vulnerability. Photos not seen by PW. (August)