Goddess of the rueful chuckle, provocateuse of domestic drudgery, flaunter of feminine/feminist angst, writer Hilma Wolitzer has been a hero of mine since I was in a fiction workshop she led at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, almost forty years ago. The roster of presenters was rich with male luminaries of literature, including Tim O’Brien, John Gardner, and Howard Nemerov, among others. From the first day, crowds of admirers trailed them.
Hilma was lower profile – more like one of us instead of one of them – but when she read from her then-recent novel, “In the Palomar Arms,” the range of her talents was in full view.
The scene involved a husband and wife, Kenny and Joy Bannister, at home in their New York apartment. A salesman from On-Guard, Inc. was demonstrating features of home security systems using before-and-after depictions of a domicile not unlike the Bannister’s. Against the backdrop of a cozy fire in the fireplace, a woman was seated at the piano. Two children, a boy and a girl, frolicked with the family dog. A man, presumably husband of the pianist, had one arm around her shoulders. He appeared to be singing, his mouth open “in the perfect O of joyous song.”
The next visual captured the aftermath of a break-in when no alarm was installed.
“The woman was still seated at the piano, but at a strange, unnatural angle. Her sheet music was scattered around her and splattered with blood. Cupboards and drawers hung open, their contents tangled and spilled.”
The husband, riddled with extensive wounds, was obviously dead. The O of his mouth, rounded in shock, not song.
The children were in the clutches of two masked men, while four or five others ransacked the room. One of them held the gun that had felled the dog. The creepiest coup de grace was the hearth, now devoid of fire.
Wolitzer had the esteemed literary audience laughing at the dark humor while also exploring the ways fear was a marketing tool, even in the early 80’s.
Fast forward to 2022. At 91, Hilma is alive and well. Her writing skills, sharp as ever, still sizzle with a shot of wry. Her newest publication, “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket,” includes stories from the 1960s to the 80s, first published in magazines like Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Ms.
Her publishing credits are impressive, including nine novels, four books for kids, and a non-fiction book about writing. Recipient of a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she also received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. When readers hear the Wolitzer surname, however, they are more likely to think of her daughter, Meg, who launched her own distinguished literary career when she was still an undergrad.
Hilma did not publish until she was 44, when the Post picked up her first short story, and she never took her success for granted. In an LA Times interview she described herself as a “late bloomer,” admitting she was raised to be a housewife.
“I went along with the plan,” she said. “My writing was a surreptitious ‘hobby,’ something I did in rare moments alone. I took that time-worn advice: ‘Write what you know.’ So my early fiction takes place in the familiar terrain of supermarkets, playgrounds, bedrooms and kitchens.”
The title story in “Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket” is narrated by a young woman, pregnant with her first child. Her rosy images of impending motherhood are up-ended when she witnesses a mother of two young children blocking the aisle.
“There is no end to it. I have tried and tried,” she insists, “and there is no end to it. Ask Harold. Ask anybody, ask my mother.”
Amidst rattling carts of impatient shoppers and calls for the manager, the wanna-be and as-is mothers are face to face, “as if primed for a television commercial in which the magical product would come winging from the shelves, where brand X would forever stay, unwanted and untried.”
The silent desperation of her counterpart makes the younger woman anxious. “I worried that my concern for her would somehow affect the child I was carrying. Didn’t I worry two aisles back, if, when the time came, I would choose the right baby food, that my milk would flow, that I would be a wise and tranquil mother?”
Taking charge, the mother-to-be tries to find someone who knows where the stricken mother lives. When the husband is finally located, he shows up and takes her home.
Once the hubbub dies down, the pregnant woman feels she has somehow proved herself. The others, like a Greek chorus, say goodbye while she supposes, “that someday they would ask me to join committees and protest groups and the PTA. My matriarchical stature had changed to a pregnant waddle. When my husband came home from work, I was sitting in the bathtub and weeping.”
She tells him about the incident and he asks, “What did you do?”
“There was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. I mean, I tried, but there was simply no way that I could help her.”
The foreword to the book, by the inimitable, best-selling creator of Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, calls the stores gratifying, funny, and well-crafted. “You may find — at first glance — ” she remarks, “what you think of as ordinary lives, but you will come away recognizing that every person does, in fact, have an extraordinary life.”
Regardless of the year each one was originally published, the stories have a contemporary feel. “Photographs” addresses abortion, in an era when ”the doctors in my life were of the old-fashioned, tongue-depressor variety who probably accepted kickbacks on unnecessary, but lawful, hysterectomies.”
“The Sex Maniac” reports that one was loose in the urban apartment complex during a “long asexual winter” where there were many sightings of the monster, but no crimes committed.
“There had been an invasion of those widows lately as if old men were dying off in job lots. The widows marched behind the moving men, fluttering, birdlike. Their sons and daughters were there to supervise, looking sleek and modern next to the belongings – chairs with curved legs, massive headboards of marriage beds trembling on the backs of movers.”
The last story, “The Great Escape” is up-to-the-minute in relevance. When she and daughter Meg were putting the collection together, Hilma and her husband of 68 years, Morty, came down with COVID-19. They both were hospitalized but dispatched to different hospitals. Hilma recovered, her husband did not.
“When I came home to our apartment,” she recalls, “it was just as we’d left it. Dishes in the sink, a book left open on a table. His shoes were still next to the bed and his pillow still held the impression of his head. He seems to have simply vanished.”
A delightful and provocative mix of wise woman and wiseacre, Hilma Wolitzer is a writer to be read at any age. During Women’s History Month, I am honored to lionize her and to urge others to get acquainted with her work. The fact that she is still writing at 91 is enviable, although she admits the easy flow of language she enjoyed in her younger days now occurs in fits and starts.
In an article in Literary Hub, she explains, “Like many people my age, I seem to lose a noun or two every day lately. They’re like buttons that have fallen off my shirt and rolled under the bed, and I can’t bend down to retrieve them. I can no longer count on my famous short-term memory either… Anyone who claims that age is ‘just a number’ is either young or works for Hallmark.”
“Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket” was published in August by Bloomsbury Publishing to much acclaim. It was an NPR Best Book of the Year, a NY Times Editors’ Choice, a “People” magazine Book of the Week, among other kudos.
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