Housewife is not a dirty word - American Housewife author Helen Ellis to visit Australia

A writer and champion poker player, Ellis is heading to Australia to attend this year’s Perth Writers Festival and visit Sydney and Melbourne. During the tour Ellis will discuss her wickedly funny collection of short stories American Housewife, subverting traditional stereotypes of women in literature, writing humour and the power of the domestic.
 
Set in the dark world of domesticity, American Housewife is sharp, funny, and delightfully unhinged collection of stories featuring murderous ladies who lunch, celebrity treasure-hunters (Dumpster Diving with the Stars…) and the best bra-fitter south of the Mason Dixon line.
 
These ladies smoke their eyes and paint their lips. They channel Beyoncé while doing household chores. They drown their sorrows with Chanel No. 5 and host book clubs where chardonnay trumps Charles Dickens. They redecorate. And they are quietly capable of kidnapping, breaking and entering, and murder.
 
These women know the rules of a well-lived life: replace your tights every winter, listen to erotic audio books while you scrub the bathroom floor, serve what you want to eat at your dinner parties, and accept it: you’re too old to have more than one drink and sleep through the night.


Photo courtesy of Simon & Schuster AU

PRAISE FOR AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE:
“Surreal tales of American weirdness, with details that ring all too true. Ouch, I say at times. At other times, yikes.” Margaret Atwood

“Crackle[s] with domestically ambivalent characters: the modern day Betty Drapers in Helen Ellis’s short story collection, American Housewife, whose tensions over wainscoting and book clubs escalate into near-farce.” Vogue

“…funny, sharply observed and often disturbing tales about the psyche of the American housewife pulsing just below the surface of social respectability.” The Guardian


Photo courtesy of Simon & Schuster AU

 “If anyone can make the Real Housewives look dull, it’s the women in this collection of darkly hilarious stories.” Cosmopolitan

 “American Housewife is a raucous, whip-smart collection of stories featuring retro-feminist ladies who lunch, launch madcap getaway schemes, and whack their naughty doormen with kitchen stools.” Elle
“The stories are addictive and full of pitch-perfect observations.” The New York Times

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