“FRAN LEBOWITZ HAS ACHIEVED THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM: She gets to live out a writer’s most wild fantasy life without ever having to do the actual writing part,” Rachel Shukert writes at Tablet, reviewing the new HBO documentary on Lebowitz directed by Martin Scorsese:

Susan Sontag—until her death the third member of New York’s great triumvirate of Overrated Jewish Lesbians, along with Le(i)bow(v)itzes Fran and Annie—famously called Fran “a rich man’s boor,” and, indeed, it’s easy to understand how Lebowitz’s tales of inconvenience and irritation might prove uproariously profound to those Masters of the Universe who have managed to eradicate petty nuisances from their lives. To the rest of us, for whom stroller rage and apartment envy and wishing things were cheaper form life’s heartbeat, they hardly seem worthy of comment.

There is one area in which Fran Lebowitz has by all measures succeeded brilliantly, one that Scorsese’s film, which consists almost entirely of uninterrupted images of her, gives us plenty of time to ponder. Fran Lebowitz has perfected her look. Her boulevardier wardrobe, her trademark cigarette/sneer, her unruly Beethoven bob: She has precisely distilled, or perhaps invented, our idea of what a “sardonic New York literary curmudgeon” should look like and has stuck to it faithfully for decades. This tastefully nihilistic pose has been her fortune and, perhaps perversely, also her undoing as an artist. “I’m not interested in other people, so I don’t expect them to be interested in me,” she claims. Fair enough (if somewhat specious), except that the single requirement of the art of writing—to say nothing of the art of conversation—is exactly that.

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