Halley Feiffer: 3 books

“I’ve been single for so long, I’ve started having sexual fantasies about my vibrator,? riffs Karla for her captive, cancer-ward audience. The patients—her mother, who’s recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer, and her roommate behind the curtain, aren’t laughing—or even awake—but...

Ella is a precocious and fiercely competitive actress whose aims in life are making her famous playwright father proud—and becoming famous herself. In the aftermath of a boozy, drug-fueled evening when Ella’s father is particularly hurtful, she flings herself into the arms of a young director...

Left to their own devices by their alcoholic mother, Ada and Sam cultivate an insular world into which they soon draw a third wheel “ a pockmarked, limping wallflower named Dorrie. In the years spanning childhood to young adulthood, these three troubled girls learn to lean on each other completely,...