The Secret Lives of Housewives

It’s a wonder that anyone has the nerve to write about housewives at all anymore: Not only are these women bored, but they have been universally declared boring. Yet last year saw the publication of Hausfrau, an acclaimed novel by the poet Jill Alexander Essbaum about a disconsolate American woman languishing in her husband’s stifling hometown in Switzerland, and this month brings American Housewife, a short story collection by Helen Ellis. Add to that Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, a 2014 novel that, while not technically about a housewife, wrestles with the same conflict between family life and self-determination, and it’s clear that the theme is enjoying a minirevival of sorts.
~Laura Miller, "Ladies of Leisure"

Novels featuring housewives as protagonists first burst on the scene in the 1960s-70s, with memorable opuses including Susan Isaacs' Compromising Positions, Judy Blume's Wifey and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, the latter two first novels for both authors (in Blume's case, her first novel for adult readers). Some of these early novels were sexy, some were polemics, but they definitely had a different take on the "suburban malaise" of earlier novels by their male counterparts featuring housewives, such as Revolutionary Road or Rabbit, Run. This was also the era that Erma Bombeck began publishing her "At Wit's End" columns, which took a humorous look at the lives of wives and mothers.

But, since them, we have had Desperate Housewives and Real Housewives of several different locales, and novels about lives in suburbia have become more twisted - or their secrets and controversies are more exposed, including vigilantes (Tom Perrotta's Little Children), familial doom (Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides), brutal murder (Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones),  deception (Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl), and wife-swapping (Rick Moody's The Ice Storm).

We've compiled for you a list of fictional housewives with all sorts of adventures and dilemmas: in a "quirky ode to love, fate, and hair metal"*; trying to fit in in a seaside village with a soap-selling mafia; trapped in what looks like a picture-perfect marriage; after the end of marriage, trying to make ends meet in a dodgy apartment-sitting situation; dealing with family secrets coming to a head; meeting a celebrity crush who changes everything; even a 35-year friendship that becomes a writers' circle. Being a housewife is not a quiet or uncomplicated life! As Helen Ellis said on Twitter, in her housewife persona (her handle is WhatIDoAllDay, and she regards her feed as an online "cocktail party"), “I’m not bored, I’m lying in wait."

My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki
 
Love May Fail by Matthew Quick [eBook]

Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
(particularly the stories from the collection Family Ties)

Housewitch by Katie Schickel  

The Hummingbird's Cage by Tamara Dietrich 

The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer

Vintage by Susan Gloss

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel

Plastic by Christopher Fowler

The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood

Hush Little Baby by Suzanne Redfearn

Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories by Lucia Perillo
(particularly stories such as "Dr. Vicks", "Anyone Else But Me", and "Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain")

Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford [eBook]

How To Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway

The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale [eAudiobook]

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton [eBook]

The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church   

The Longest Night by Andria Williams

The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee

           

For more titles starring housewives, try a subject search!

*from the library catalog 

Featured Author: Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez is an American writer of German and Chinese-Panamanian descent, the author of six novels and a memoir, and a contributor to numerous anthologies and literary magazines. Her first book, 1995's A Feather on the Breath of God, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and also received the Association for Asian American Studies Award for best novel of the year. Her memoir is about  living with her mentor, Susan Sontag, in the 1970s, while briefly dating Sontag's son, David Rieff. Nunez has taught at several universities and at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She was born, raised, and currently resides in New York City.

You can read some of her stories, essays, and interviews online using links from her website. Oprah.com features a video of Nunez called "Your Best Defense Against Loneliness and Heartbreak".

Nunez's "major preoccupations as a novelist have been language, memory, identity, class, and writing itself." Salon's Andrew O'Hehir has this to say about her novel The Last of Her Kind:

What begins as an enjoyable comedy of manners about the overly intense friendship between two Barnard College freshmen in 1970 — part Mary McCarthy, part Joan Didion — gradually adds sinew, steam and texture. Building in scope and excitement as it goes, it blossoms into a powerful and acute social novel, perhaps the finest yet written about that peculiar generation of young Americans who believed their destiny was to shape history.

Why not give one of Nunez's "satisfying, provocative" works a try?

A Feather on the Breath of God
A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality. It is a story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love. [Goodreads]

Naked Sleeper 
Feckless, nervous, irresolute, often troubled with insomnia, Nona longs for a life of firm purpose, order, and dignity. Why, though happily married, does she fly across the country to pursue a man she hardly knows, whom she intuitively mistrusts and does not even much care for? In the aftermath of this  calamity, Nona separates from her husband and undergoes a period of intense self-examination.  Meanwhile, she struggles to complete a book about her father, a painter, who died when she was a child. Out of both projects, her work of introspection and her work of memory, arise thorny questions about love, identity, and destiny. Naked Sleeper...is the story of a woman's search for self-knowledge, for understanding of others, and for an answer to the imperative question: How should she live?
 

The Last of Her Kind
The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Barnard campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first Ann's fate seems to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But in searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work.

Salvation City [eBook]
Seeking refuge in the home of an evangelical pastor after a flu pandemic decimates the planet's populations, thirteen-year-old orphan Cole witnesses the community's preparations for a prophesied religious cataclysm and struggles with memories of a very different world.  [library catalog]

*All book descriptions are taken from the book blurb unless otherwise noted.

Why Your Twenties Matter

Once more I find myself writing about a book that is targeted toward a specific audience, but anyone with an interest in psychology or "the twenties" will find the book enthralling.  Because it is so well written, and the author's conversations with her clients so resonant, it is a quick read.

The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay has enchanted me. When I first saw the title, I opened it and devoured the inside cover.  I had to read the rest of it!  With hardly any time left in my twenties, though, I fretted will this book tell me I've done it all wrong? have I set myself up for a lifetime of failure and struggle?  Journeying through the aspects of life that Jay dissects as they apply to twentysomethings - among them: love, work, the brain, and the body - has turned out to be much like going through actual therapy with a counselor. The message is sobering, yet empowering: time in our twenties is both easy to waste and precious, but each of us can chart the course of our thirties and beyond by making informed choices right away. 

Much of The Defining Decade consists of conversations between Jay and her twentysomething clients, who I found very easy to like and relate to.  The frustration they express echoes my own sentiment: if my twenties are supposed to be the best years of my life, why have they been so hard?!  Well, Jay has demystified that question.  The twenties are supposed to be hard because they are the crucible in which our futures are forged.  Using her own years of experience counseling twentysomethings, and plenty of research, Jay lays out a road map of sorts that makes the twenties much more manageable.  She offers lots of practical advice, including: challenge yourself with your career choices, don't shy away from commitments, and consider the facts about fertility that our culture all but denies. 

Like I said, this book is an enlightening read for anybody, but obviously for those in their twenties (the earlier the better!), and especially for mentors of twentysomethings.  Part of the difficulty of being in our twenties is that not only do we generally not know the best ways to navigate them, but many of our parents and mentors don't have the knowledge to guide us effectively through the unique challenges we face in our twenties in the 2010s either.  I will admit that before picking up The Defining Decade, I didn't even realize that my twenties were an especially formative time.  Oh yes, I knew I was making tons of big, stressful choices, but doesn't that go on throughout life?  (Jay answers that question as well, for anyone also in the dark - I know I'm not the only one!) 

As for me, I wish I had discovered this book when it was written in 2012 - I would have felt so much better about how difficult things in my life seemed!  I would have realized that the solutions to my twentysomething problems were not so complex after all; that what happened in my past is not as important as the choices that I make now; and that those choices can help my future more than digging up any trauma that might lie in my past.

I'll finish with this quote from the introduction, which pretty well sums up The Defining Decade:

 . . . twentysomethings are like airplanes, planes just leaving New York City bound for somewhere west.  Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in either Seattle or San Diego.  But once a plane is nearly in San Diego, only a big detour will redirect it to the northwest.  

Likewise, in the twentysomething years, even a small shift can radically change where we end up in our thirties and beyond.  The twenties are an up-in-the-air and turbulent time, but if we can figure out how to navigate, even a little bit at a time, we can get further, faster, than at any other stage in life.  It is a pivotal time when the things we do - and the things we don't do - will have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.  

So let's get going.  The time is now.

Election Reads

Concerned citizens and voters looking to better inform themselves on the structural mechanisms and personality dramas that define political campaigns may want to spend some time over the next couple of months away from the television and the blogosphere, and inside the pages of political campaign classics. They are books that, because of their depth of insight, quality of prose, and enduring relevance, offer an education far beyond what typically passes for analysis and commentary during the political Super Bowl.
~David Masciotra, "What 10 Books to Read for the Election Season: Cicero, Vidal, and More"

It's election season! Presidential candidates are on the campaign trail and the New Mexico primary election is coming soon. Here at abcreads we remain non-partisan in the face of relentless polling and trolling, but we have compiled a list of political reads pertinent to a presidential election year which might interest those who are politically savvy and might just teach the rest of us "something about the real-life business of political horse racing".* We're not sure all the books listed below qualify as "political campaign classics", but you can use "Campaign Tips from Cicero" to judge their merits for yourself!

Non-Fiction

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 - America's First Presidential Campaign by Edward J. Larson

1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson   

The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America by John R. MacArthur

The Year of Indecision, 1946: A Tour Through the Crucible of Harry Truman's America by Kenneth Weisbrode 

Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris, Jr 

The Fight to Vote by Michael Waldman

Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by John Ferling

Let the People Rule : Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary by Geoffrey Cowan

Running From Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned Off to Politics by Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox 

Love & War: Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home by James Carville and Mary Matalin 

1960 - LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies by David Pietrusza 

Up, Simba!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate by David Foster Wallace [eBook]

Fiction

Washington, D.C. by Gore Vidal

Hartsburg, USA by David Mizner   

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics by Anonymous

Echo House by Ward Just

Election by Tom Perrotta    

The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear by Stuart Stevens 

Our Lady of Greenwich Village by Dermot McEvoy 

A Time to Run by Barbara Boxer with Mary-Rose Hayes 

Talk by Michael Smerconish

 

Links

Political Books: 5 of the Best Books About Elections [Entertainment Cheat Sheet]

Political Books: What Campaign Novels Can Teach Us [HuffPost]*

Featured Author: Maggie Gee

Maggie Gee is a British author who has written 11 novels.1 short story collection, and a memoir. In 1983, she made Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list, a group which included Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, and Rose Tremain; in 2004 she became the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2012 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature. Her daughter is the writer Rosa Rankin-Gee.

Maggie Gee's fiction has touched on world wars, ecological catastrophe, dystopia, satire, and racism, but "her books are always funny as well as serious." She has been a judge for many prizes, including the Man Booker, and has herself been on the short list for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award (both for The White Family). She teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University, where she shares an office with fellow professor and author Fay Weldon. [Wikipedia] Her research interests include evolutionary biology and the visual arts.

You can watch a video her at Meet the Author UK, discussing her short story collection, and see a picture of her study in the Guardian's "Writers' Rooms" series. She is not the Maggie Gee who was a Chinese-American aviator during WWII, though a literary festival once made that mistake.


The Blue [eBook] 
The people in The Blue, Maggie Gee’s first collection of short stories, try and often fail to understand the world, freeing themselves by small acts of courage, love or folly. A journalist decides to convert an evangelist in mid-air; a solicitor gives up his day job to help young artists; a Middle Eastern woman shocks her children as she walks through the heat towards the sea; a man, in a moment of madness, cuts down his neighbour’s tree. These subtle fables of everyday life are set against an intricate global backdrop where life is harder for outsiders. Exquisitely written and aerated by comedy, they show human beings who struggle to live good lives. 

My Driver [eBook]
Vanessa Henman, a plucky but accident-prone white writer, flies from London to Uganda for an African writers' conference. She also means to visit her former cleaner, Ugandan Mary Tendo, now the successful Executive Housekeeper of Kampala's up-market Sheraton Hotel. But Mary has her own agenda: her son Jamil is missing, and she has secretly summoned Vanessa's beloved ex-husband Trevor, a plumber, to her home village to build a new well. Vanessa sets off alone on safari to distant Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to see the mountain gorillas. But she quarrels with her driver and a bloody war closes in. 

The White Family [eBook]
Alfred White, a London park keeper, rules his home with a mixture of ferocity and tenderness that has estranged his three children. But family ties are strong, and when Alfred collapses on duty one day, they rush to be with him. His daughter's partner, Elroy, a black social worker, is brought face to face with Alfred's younger son Dirk, who hates and fears all black people, and the scene is set for violence, forcing Alfred's wife May to choose between justice and kinship. This groundbreaking novel takes on the taboo subject of racial hatred as it looks at love, hatred, sex, comedy and death.  

My Cleaner [eBook]
Ugandan Mary Tendo worked for many years in the white middle-class Henman household in London, cleaning for Vanessa and looking after her only child, Justin. More than ten years after Mary has left, Justin – now twenty-two – is too depressed to get out of bed. To his mother's surprise, he asks for Mary. When Mary responds to Vanessa's cry for help and returns from Uganda to look after Justin, the balance of power in the house shifts dramatically. Both women's lives change irrevocably as tensions build towards a climax on a snowbound motorway.  

Young Adult Releases: June and July

Looking for something good to read this summer? There are plenty of options! Here is a list of young adult books coming out in June and July. These are not comprehensive lists, as there are far too many books to make such a list.

June releases

The Leaving by Tara Altebrando
The Long Game by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
The King Slayer by Virginia Boecker
Tumbling by Caela Carter
With Malice by Eileen Cook
Into the River by Ted Dawe
The Darkest Lie by Pintip Dunn
Julia Vanishes by Catherine Egan
Lotus and Thorn by Sara W. Etienne
The Loose Ends List by Carrie Firestone
Zero Line Chronicles by James Frey
We Were Never Here by Jennifer Gilmore
My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand
Cure for the Common Universe by Christian McKay Heidicker
Empire of Dust by Eleanor Herman
The End by Charlie Higson
How it Feels to Fly by Kathryn Holmes
The Flip Side by Shawn Johnson
Mirror in the Sky by Aditi Khorana
The Museum of Heartbreak by Meg Leder
You Know Me Well by David Levithan and Nina LaCour
How it Ends by Catherine Lo
True Letters from a Fictional Life by Kenneth Logan
Goldfish by Nat Luurtsema
A Season for Fireflies by Amanda Maizel
Never Missing, Never Found by Amanda Panitch
The Darkest Magic by Morgan Rhodes
Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies by Lindsay Ribar
Before We Go Extinct by Karen Rivers
Escape from Asylum by Madeleine Roux
How to Disappear by Ann Redisch Stampler
One Paris Summer by Denise Grover Swank
The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love by Sarvenaz Tash
American Girls by Alison Umminger
The Cresswell Plot by Eliza Wass
And I Darken by Kiersten White

July releases

The Memory Book by Laura Avery
Girl in the Shadows by Gwenda Bond
Mirage by Tracy Clark
Chasing Stars by Helen Douglas
The Shadow Hour by Melissa Grey
The Killer in Me by Margot Harrison
Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch
The Devil's Banshee by Donna Hosie
Flying by Carrie Jones
Defending Taylor by Miranda Kenneally
Learning to Swear in America by Katie Kennedy
The Lost & Found by Katrina Leno
Secrets, Lies, and Scandals by Amanda K. Morgan
Rampage by John Sandford
Rebellion by J.A. Souders
Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies by Laura Stampler
Autumn's Wish by Bella Thorne
The Exorcism of Sofia Flores by Danielle Vega

Stay tuned--on June 4, we'll have a post announcing this year's Summer Reading Program, along with ideas for how you can read more this summer.

New and Novel: Women in Science

Last year saw the publication of The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club. Author Eileen Pollack wanted to be an astrophysicist in the 1970s, but gave up her dream, despite being one of the first two women to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in physics at Yale, because she was unable to overcome the isolation, stereotyping, and gender discrimination the still faces women today who seek academic success in science and math. We hope this climate will change for women, with the White House espousing STEM for female students and events such as Sweden's Tekla Festival, where "girls between 11 and 18 years will get a chance to spend a full day discovering and experimenting with different kinds of technology...[offering] girls firsthand experience of the ways they can use technology, and a chance to meet female role models in a variety of fields."

If you are someone whose knowledge of women's contributions to science and math begins and ends with Marie Curie (we were!), why not check out one of these new titles and find out more about female achievements in these fields?

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which shes studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant lifebut it is also so much more. Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahrens remarkable stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classrooms labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, of scientific work

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt
The riveting true story of the women who launched America into space. In the 1940s and 50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible. For the first time, Rise of the Rocket Girls tells the stories of these women--known as "human computers"--who broke the boundaries of both gender and science.


Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist by George D. Morgan
Blending a fascinating personal history with dramatic historical events, this book brings long-overdue attention to a brilliant woman whose work proved essential for America's early space program. This is the extraordinary true story of America's first female rocket scientist. Told by her son, it describes Mary Sherman Morgan's crucial contribution to launching America's first satellite and the author's labyrinthine journey to uncover his mother's lost legacy--one buried deep under a lifetime of secrets political, technological, and personal. 

The Debs of Bletchley Park And Other Stories by Michael Smith 
At the peak of Bletchley's success, a total of twelve thousand people worked there of whom nine thousand were women. Their roles ranged from some of the leading codebreakers, cracking German messages that others could not break, through the debutantes who chauffeured the codebreakers to and from work, to women like Baroness Trumpington who were employed as filing clerks, to the mass of girls from ordinary working families who operated machines or listed endless streams of figures, largely unaware of the major impact their work was having on the war. The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories tells the stories of these women, how they came to be there, the lives they gave up to do 'their bit' for the war effort, and the part they played in the vital work of 'Station X'.  

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan
In this book the author traces the story of the unsung World War II workers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee through interviews with dozens of surviving women and other Oak Ridge residents. This is the story of the young women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who unwittingly played a crucial role in one of the most significant moments in U.S. history.

Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science--And the World by Rachel Swaby
Covering Nobel Prize winners and major innovators, as well as lesser-known but hugely significant scientists who influence our every day, Rachel Swaby's ... profiles span centuries of courageous thinkers and illustrate how each one's ideas developed, from their first moment of scientific engagement through the research and discovery for which they're best known.

Links

Association for Women in Mathematics

Association for Women in Science

Why Are There Still So Few Women In Science? [New York Times]

Women Were Key to WWII Code-Breaking at Bletchley Park [Smithsonian]