Taffy Brodesser-Akner Overcooks It

In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s celebrity profiles, which made her name, the word want tends to appear ten or 20 or 30 times. Ethan Hawke wants his film set to feel “like a Sunday afternoon.” Kris Jenner wants, in Costco, “to pick out the salmon with the herb butter on her own.” Josh Brolin wants “to work, of course he wanted to work. But he also wanted to not hate himself in the morning.”

The implication is that Brodesser-Akner is unusually capable of burrowing...