Diary of a Mad Housewife Author:Sue Kaufman "What I am suddenly afraid of-most everything you could name. I'm afraid of: elevators, tunnels, muggers, rapists, sharks, fires, tidal waves, fatal diseases".....So writes Bettina Balser in the first entry of her "journal." Tina's life has many of the appurtenances, encumbrances and perquisites of the middle-class "housewife" in New York City.... more » She has two girs, aged nine and seven, who are alternately monstrous and lovable; a maid who comes in by the day; bad nerves; an incontinent poodle; a cavernous apartment on Central Park West; insomnia; few friends but many acquaintances; an unsatisfactory sex life; a nostalgia for the first years of her marriage; an aversion to cocktail parties; an ambitious and insensitive husband who is a bully and a nag - and the suspicion that she is slowly going out of her mind.
As a form of therapy, Tina begins a secret diary, in which she pours out her thoughts and emotions, and records the dreary chores of her meaningless and cluttered existence. The result is fresh, mordant entertainment, for in Tina's exceptionally frank account of the way she lives and feels, she casts a cool eye on New York mores, extramarital sex, coping with trivia, the urban male and, above all, on the woman who chooses to be called a housewife.
Witty, poignant, fresh and knowing, Diary of a Mad Housewife will be relished by women, will make many men blush, and will impel every reader to think twice about some of the idiocies of daily life.« less