by Lucy Ellmann
First published 2019
An Ohio housewife stands in her kitchen making one cherry pie after another. She weaves lattice crusts while her mind races through an endless stream of worries. Her children's safety weighs on her thoughts alongside memories of her dead parents. African elephants face extinction while she puzzles over the bedroom habits of supposedly happy couples. Weapons of Mass Destruction lurk somewhere in the world as she wonders how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg she found. School shootings happen while she prepares franks and beans for dinner. Medical bills pile up as survivalists prepare for collapse. Her consciousness flows between the mundane tasks of motherhood and housework and the overwhelming flood of information that defines modern American life. She tries to make sense of a country that seems bent on destroying itself and sleepwalking toward environmental catastrophe. Through her domestic routine, she grapples with America's violence and cruelty across history. The gap between her small daily acts of care and the nation's larger failures creates a tension she cannot resolve. Her story becomes both an angry critique of American brutality and a funny, tender portrait of one woman trying to survive it all.
Genres: domestic-fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: stream-of-consciousness, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Ohio, United States
Period: 21st-century
1030 pages · Paperback · Galley Beggar Press
Content warnings: anxiety, depression, mental-illness