American Housewife: Hysterical Insights

If you want to end 2016 with a laugh, you must pick up a copy of American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis. This bizarre collection of short stories about housewives across the country will make your brain explode with delight. Like a cross between George Saunders and David Sedaris, except if both were bored housewives living out insane fantasies, Helen Ellis unveils the twisted inner workings of the most overlooked branch of the populace and ensures you will never talk to a housewife ever again without experiencing mild terror.

I was hooked after reading the first two pages of this book. Opening with a short essay entitled, "What I Do All Day," Ellis gives us such gems as, "Back home, I get a sickening feeling and find out it's just my husband's coat hung the wrong way in a closet. I break into a sweat when I find a Sharpie cap but not the pen." These mundane observations keep accumulating until every sentence elicits a chuckle and a sense of wonderment at this woman's ability to string words together in effervescent combinations. This is followed by "The Wainscoting War," an epistolary tale narrated via the e-mails exchanged by two feuding neighbors that quickly escalates into an epic battle akin to something out of Game of Thrones. We then get "Dumpster Diving with the Stars," an incisive look at reality television and celebrity culture, followed by "Southern Lady Code," which tells you everything you ever wanted to know about what Southern ladies really mean when they say, "She's the nicest person."

The stories in this book can be divided into two broad categories: short snippets that offer up truly great advice about how to live your life (read "How to Be a Grown-Ass Lady" and learn the following: "If you don't like something someone says, say: 'That's interesting.' If you like something someone says, say: 'That's interesting!'"); and crazy tales that devolve into murder, vengeance, or Shakespearean levels of tragicomedy. Stories like "The Fitter," about a man who has the gift to find any woman the perfect bra, are incredibly funny and then suddenly go dark, whilst other tales, like "Hello! Welcome to Book Club" are seething with a passive-aggressive geniality that you can't quite comprehend until the narrator slowly winds through all the introductions and unveils what this Book Club is all about.

By the time you get to the book's final story, "My Novel Is Brought to You by the Good People at Tampax," you know what to expect in terms of tone, but still have no idea what to expect in terms of story. Ellis does not disappoint, ending her collection with an absolute corker of a tale that manages to touch on the publishing industry, corporate branding, social media, kidnapping, and blackmail. The insanity relentlessly builds on itself until you are completely invested in the narrator and her horrific struggle with her corporate overlords, i.e. "The Good People at Tampax."

I have never been more delighted by a book and more sad to finish it. Each story reminded me of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, with every sentence meticulously crafted and guaranteed to provoke joy. Given that women were accused of being "hysterical" for centuries, Ellis has captured the most incredible sense of hysteria in this collection, taking all the everyday worries and concerns that women face and amplifying them into hyperbolic fantasies that manage to both unsettle and delight the reader in equal measure. American Housewife: Stories should be essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what women are really thinking; though I must assure you, I am generally worrying more about uncapped Sharpies than murdering my doorman.