Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket Review

The uncannily relevant, deliciously clear-eyed collected stories of a critically acclaimed, award-winning author who is ripe for rediscovery--with a foreword by Elizabeth Strout.

From her many well-loved novels, Hilma Wolitzer--now 90 years old and at the top of her game--has gained a reputation as one of our best fiction writers. These collected short stories--most of them originally published in magazines including Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a new story that brings her early characters into the present--are evocative of an era that still resonates deeply today.

In the title story, a bystander tries to soothe a woman who seems to have cracked under the pressures of motherhood. And in several linked stories throughout, the relationship between the narrator and her husband unfolds in telling and often hilarious vignettes. Of their time and yet timeless, Wolitzer's stories zero in on the domestic sphere and ordinary life with wit, candor, grace, and an acutely observant eye. Brilliantly capturing the tensions and contradictions of daily life, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket is full of heart and insight, providing a lens into a world that was often unseen at the time, and often overlooked now--reintroducing a beloved writer to be embraced by a whole new generation of readers.

General Impressions

In all honesty, the moment I realized this was a short story collection, I was prepared to like it and then mostly forget about it the moment I picked up my nest read in a fantasy series.

I knew nothing about the importance of these stories or who the author was so I was completely caught by surprise when I opened this book and was greeted by the Bloomsbury Publishing Director's letter and Elizabeth Strout's Foreword and the passion they felt for these stories. I could immediately tell I was holding a product of love, (not when it came to the writing, of that process I know nothing about), but about how this collection came to be on our shelves. Turns out, you do feel the difference when a book is loved by all the minds that take to make it a possibility and all the hands that are passionate about sharing it with the world.

This is a book written by a master of the craft so of course, the writing was beautiful and the stories were meaningful. Hilma was praised in the Foreword as someone that shed light inside the American household and with this book being set mostly in the second half of the twentieth century, consequently on the housewives, women and mothers that up until then were ignored or seen as something devoid of importance and living only to be useful to the male main characters.

While men are always present if nothing else in thought throughout these stories, I don't think I'm wrong in seeing these stories as very much female-focused, from childhood to the teenage years, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, old age and how all those things are given more or less importance across the decades. Love in all those shapes was also a big theme inside this book in all its imperfect, unromanticized glory.

Something I will always remember in this book is definitely all the birth and labour scenes and how akin to medieval torture they were written as. It was shocking to see how different things were for women not so long ago.

Most if not all of these stories had been previously published across the decades, except for the very last one. How strange it was to see the pandemic we are still living through being immortalized in the same volume as all those stories from the '60s and '70s.

Conclusions

This is a book filled with the kind of stories that can be read in a few minutes and then you find yourself coming back to them again and again in the middle of the calmer hours of your day and life, incapable of letting go or forgetting them.

I know I write it often but it's still true: this is one of those books that I will keep on my shelf and reread in a completely different way as the years make me a different person.

Thank you to Bloomsbury for this ARC

Rating: 5/5