Mostly written in the 1960s and 1970s, the stories focus on one theme: what it’s like to be a married woman in a time when women focused on home and children, rather than careers. Seven of the stories feature the same family that lives in a too-small, high-rise New York City apartment—Howard and Paulette (Paulie) and their very young children Jason and Ann. Paulie gets “in trouble” at age 20, and she and Howard get married. We then learn about their lives in subsequent stories from Howard’s ex-wife coming to live with them to a sex maniac on the loose in the communal laundry room to the escapist fun of spending Sunday afternoons looking at model homes in the suburbs as a way of staving off Howard’s depression.
Bonus: The last story, which takes place in 2020 at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, checks in on Howard and Paulie some 50 years later. It is heartbreaking and tragically relevant.
These 13 stories are keenly observed snippets of ordinary life, interspersed with passion and boredom, laughter and love—just like real life. The power of this collection is in the brilliantly written sentences about the quotidian details of everyday living, making the stories resonate with insight and wisdom. Best of all, they are a delight to read.
