American Housewife
Stories
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2.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A raucous, whip-smart collection of stories featuring retro-feminist ladies who lunch.” —Elle
Meet the women of American Housewife. They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it’s cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies from the oven.
Taking us from a haunted pre-war Manhattan apartment building to the unique initiation ritual of a book club, these twelve delightfully demented stories are a refreshing and wicked answer to the question: “What do housewives do all day?”
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The hilarious short stories in this collection capture the craziness that ensues when smart, passionate women have too much time and money on their hands—and not enough fulfillment. “The Wainscoting War” (read during our commute to work) is an outrageous war story involving cats, beige paint, and nuclear-grade passive-aggressiveness. And lightning-quick reads like “What I Do All Day” and “How to Be a Grown-Ass Lady” have enough biting humor to get you through a gray afternoon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ellis, a professional poker player and author (Eating the Cheshire Cat), turns domesticity on its head in her darkly funny 12-story collection, featuring hausfraus in various stages of unraveling. These wives are not like the perfect 1970s-mom Carol Brady, the blue-collar Roseanne Conner, or even the tightly wound Claire Dunphy. Ellis immediately sets the tone in "What I Do All Day," about a modern Stepford Wife she is "lucky enough to have a drawer just for glitter" with bite. In the rest of the collection, women become involved in increasingly hostile epistolary e-fights over wainscoting in a shared hallway ("The Wainscoting War"), speak in codes that require translation ("Southern Lady Code"), and take their book club to a whole new level ("Hello! Welcome to Book Club"). One wife finds a fiendish way to contend with a domineering mother-in-law and the son she raised ("Dead Doormen"); another finds that having a significant following on social media doesn't save her from her book sponsor's ruthlessness in actually getting the thing written ("My Book Is Brought to You by the Good People at Tampax"). Ellis hits the satirical bull's-eye with a deliciously dry, smart voice that will have readers flipping the pages in delight.
