Hilma Wolitzer once told an interviewer, “I don’t believe there’s such a thing as ordinary life. I think all life is extraordinary.”
In these immensely gratifying, poignant, funny, and well-crafted stories, you may find—at first glance—what you think of as ordinary lives, but you will come away recognizing that every person does, in fact, have an extraordinary life. Here you will see women and men who live their daily existence with all the turbulence of the unexpected, starting with the title story, “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.” The woman who goes mad will be imprinted indelibly on your brain, her two small boys clinging to her skirt (“Pee-pee,” one of them whispers, before wetting himself), and there is her pocketbook, which, near the end of the story, lies on the counter—empty; it has been left there by the narrator “sneakily, as one leaves a litter of kittens in a vacant lot.” In just a few pages Wolitzer reveals a glimpse of the life of this woman, her two little boys, and the husband who comes to get her. That’s all we will ever know about the woman who went mad in the supermarket. But we enter the story with our own experiences and therefore make it our own. Wolitzer always leaves enough spaces between the lines for us to embrace her work in this way. This is part of her marvelousness as a writer.
It should be noted that this story was first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1966. A number of these stories were published in Esquire in the early 1970s, and one in Ms. magazine, as well. All stories take place in a time in history, and Wolitzer captures that time with a breathtaking precision. But it is always—for Wolitzer—about the characters; that they lived during this time informs who they are, but their particularities make them special—extraordinary.
Wolitzer is largehearted in her work, judging no one. And she is also an exquisite craftswoman. She understands how to render the details so well that we are immediately placed inside the story. In “Bodies,” the protagonist, Sharon, is unexpectedly called to fly across the country to help get her husband out of a wonderfully horrifying situation—not to be gone into here—and on the plane she sits next to a man who has had a few drinks. “He leans back in his seat and faces her intimately, as if they are sharing a bed pillow.” Boom. We are right there with them.
This is another part of Wolitzer’s wonder as a writer: she will start off in one place and end up in a situation one never would have imagined, and yet it ultimately makes a kind of perfect sense. The story “Overtime” is a dazzling example of this: a man’s ex-wife won’t leave him alone in his current marriage, and his current wife’s response to this is hilarious, and also moving. The ending of this story—not to be given away here—is supreme.
As are so many of the endings; there is a little bump, and we realize we have landed safely.
This sense of safety—of being in safe hands—as we read is never to be underestimated. The reader does not have to know of this need, but the writer does. And in these stories, no matter what happens, we have the sense of safety that a great storyteller provides. Wolitzer’s prose is sure-footed as it careens us through the lives of these people. In “The Sex Maniac” the narrator waits anxiously for a spotting of the man said to be a sex maniac. The first two lines read, “Everybody said that there was a sex maniac loose in the complex and I thought—it’s about time. It had been a long asexual winter.” Humor, always riding alongside pathos, is at play in all these stories; it is there in the safety of the narrative voice.
And there is wisdom as well. In “Mother” a woman thinks: “The very worst thing, she was certain, was not human misery, but its nakedness, and the naked witness of others.” Wolitzer allows us to be that witness, but with an empathy that rises up quietly from the pages. It does not frighten us, it envelops us. This is true as we drive with Howard and his wife Paulette out to the suburbs on Sundays to view new houses on the market; her husband is depressed and “Paulie” knows this will cheer him, as it does. It is only life, we realize. In all its extraordinariness.
Hilma Wolitzer published her first piece of work—a poem—at the age of nine. It was in a publication put out by the New York City Department of Sanitation; it was a poem about winter. She has gone on to be the author of fourteen books. As a young girl she thought of herself as a poet, but as she got older she thought of herself as a visual artist. She would sit on the subway and draw the faces of people around her on the stock market pages of the newspaper she was reading. “Everyone’s face was fascinating to me, and I would wonder what their lives were like.” It is this deep, abiding—extraordinary—curiosity that makes her the writer that she is.
The story “Nights” is a magnificent portrayal of a woman with insomnia. She roams through her apartment, gazes out the window, does all the things that insomniacs do. If you ever have a sleepless night, read this story first—it will make you understand you are not alone in the world. This is what literature does for us; it breaks down these barriers for a moment within which we all live. And if you are in the hands of a master storyteller, you may even have a moment of grace and think to yourself, Thank you, Hilma Wolitzer.
Thank you.