Wifey by Judy Blume
My rating: 3/5 cats
there could be spoilers, i don’t know…i have been drinking….
so, this is my first foray into the bodice rippers group’s reading list. i don’t know, it wasn’t as bad as either of the two romance novels i had to read for my readers’ advisory class, but then again it also wasn’t as unintentionally funny as either of them. it was actually quite sad. a sad book about reaching out with a vagina in order to find love.
it chronicles the great american dream for women of the recent past—find a nice enough well-off husband, get married, have kids, tend house, play tennis, make pot roast, find yourself terribly bored, attempt suicide, have an affair or two, stay with husband for the sake of the children or whatever, close book. poor wifey. she has a nightmare husband and i do not buy any sympathetic last minute bullshit.
and i am glad that i waited to write this review until after the season premier of mad men, because they have their similarities—poor bored betty draper has one little affair and ends up marrying the guy and she gets called “a whore” by the man whose day is incomplete without an infidelity or two. at least here, the affairs are frequently a little more giggly and overt.
suburbia is a whirlwind of sexuality. there are masturbating motorcyclists on front lawns, pornographic anonymous phone calls, husbands and wives swapping and topless parties and just that general fug of desperate sex that makes me feel so sorrowful inside. the faux-permissiveness where it is all right to fuck someone else’s husband, but still have weird hang-ups about the body—ugh.
now, i have no interest in playing tennis or raising kids, but i still am a bit of a chauvinist. i don’t know, even though she is frigid and a terrible mother and has a shittily distant (now ex) husband, i sort of envy betty draper. if i had her life, i would just be curled up all day, reading. i would probably ignore the kids as much as she does, but i would have a maid for them to play with, so whatever. all i would have to do is like toss some shit in aspic and call it a meal, smoke some cigarettes, and look pretty. the rest of the time would be all me-time. and that’s all i want. i like my job just fine, but if i didn’t have to work, if all i had to do was read all day and occasionally frost a cake? i would be in fun city.
but wifey is a sad story. she does not read all day. and that’s what gets her gonorrhea. now, i am no whore, but my genitals, they have had some fun. but what she is having here, with her multiple infidelities, is not fun. it is more like revenge and science, all rolled into one.
and this is judy blume! the woman who taught us about menses and nocturnal emissions and fat chicks and divorce and who made me cry every time i read tiger eyes! and i never read forever, but i know very well, what that book taught young girls.
make infidelity sound more fun, judy blume!!
regardless, these are the things i have learned from this particular judy blume book:
if a lady touches a man’s nipples, it makes him a fag.
women are jealous of the size of other women’s nipples.
if she has sex with him on top, she is just some women’s libber trying to overpower her man
you can hook up with your gynecologist and continue to go to him with your vagina for medical reasons and it just isn’t awkward at all!
i am doing sex all wrong!
overall, the book is very all right. it is not comical enough to poke fun at, and it is not good enough to really like. but it is a fast read, with no headaches; it is a fine one-day diversion.
now there are some strawberries that have been marinating on the champagne at the bottom of this glass that need my attention…
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