American Housewife
-
-
4.3 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- £5.99
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
Meet the women of American Housewife…
They smoke their eyes and paint their lips. They channel Beyoncé while doing household chores. They drown their sorrows with Chanel No. 5 and host book clubs where chardonnay trumps Charles Dickens. They redecorate. And they are quietly capable of kidnapping, breaking and entering, and murder.
These women know the rules of a well-lived life: replace your tights every winter, listen to erotic audio books while you scrub the bathroom floor, serve what you want to eat at your dinner parties, and accept it: you’re too old to have more than one drink and sleep through the night.
Vicious, fresh and darkly hilarious, American Housewife is a collection of stories for anyone who has ever wondered what really goes on behind the façades of the housewives of America…
‘Surreal tales of American weirdness, with details that ring all too true. Ouch, I say at times. At other times, yikes’ Margaret Atwood, Guardian Best Books of the Year
‘I tore through it. It’s MAD. Utterly mad but brilliant’ Louise O’Neill
‘Each perfect little story is a fine chocolate, laced with arsenic. Wickedly funny, painfully truthful’ Erin Kelly
‘After reading American Housewife, I'm convinced Dorothy Parker faked her death and is alive and writing under the pen name “Helen Ellis”. Witty, lacerating, and sometimes touching, this book is a salty assortment of surprises, each more delicious than the last. Savor it with a dry martini’ Deanna Raybourn
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 fulfilment. “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 humour to get you through a grey 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.
