BACHELOR GIRLS <i> by Wendy Wasserstein (Alfred A. Knopf: $16.95; 209 pp.) </i>

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Heidi Chronicles,” among other plays) practices a mordant style of humorous feminist essay which broadens the category familiar from columnists like Cynthia Heimel and Alice Kahn. Wasserstein’s “Bachelor Girls” are not just women caught between post-puberty and middle-aged Angst; they are sisters doing battle with the woman’s lot in life from from Day 1 to death. Not that Wasserstein ignores the complexities of the twenty-somethings to forty-somethings. Her piece on “The World’s Worst Boyfriends” acknowledges the woes of women whose fate it is to live in a time when People magazine can run an article on “the three available, sensitive, attractive men.” But the anxieties of weight she lampoons in “To Live and Diet” begin early and last into old age. Even as a slender 8-year-old, she recalls, she and her friends were aspiring to the three “perfect diamonds” as the legs were pressed straight: between ankles, knees and upper thighs. “As I ramble through life, whatever be my goal,” she observes, “I will unfortunately always keep my eye upon the doughnut and not upon the whole.”