American Housewife - Helen Ellis

The old-school gatekeepers of Literature might want to turn away in disgust when they hear that one of this year’s most hyped new releases owes its life to a Twitter account. Author Helen Ellis ran the satirical account @Whatidoallday, sending out pithy one-liners describing the life of the typical American housewife. During the 2011 Superbowl, she tweeted ‘inspired by Beyonce, I stallion-walk to the toaster’; the account took off, and that tweet now features as the opening line of her short story collection American Housewife. If this makes you want to switch off, then don’t – American Housewife is a sharp, incisive satire with some memorably gothic moments.

Ellis’s stories examine the conflict between the surface sheen of American middle class life, and a feral wildness that lies beneath. Many of her stories, such as How to be a Patron of the Arts and How to be a Grown-Ass Woman, are mantras of conformity and self-reassurance. There is an air of performativity to her presentation of social types; each role has its own set of learned behaviours and desired outcomes. You can drink this drink to become a patron of the arts, use these words to become a southern lady.

The strangeness manifests itself in the most mundane domestic settings; in The Wainscoting War, for example, passive-aggressive email exchanges between neighbours over the decoration of shared spaces swiftly escalate into vandalism, pet murder, and divorce as the residents jealously guard their territory. Another story focusses on an apparently homely book group which turns out to be a front for a cultish gang of older women with fertility problems, who bring in young members to act as broodmares.

Ellis is often surreal and macabre, at times bordering on the magical realist. In one story, The Fitter, the ability to select perfectly-fitting bras is a mystical power, handed down families like wizardry. In another, a building is haunted by the ghosts of its staff: the block of upscale apartments requires such an expenditure of time and energy to maintain in perfect condition that it resembles a psychic vampire which drains the life force from its inhabitants. Staff and residents are married to the building, and trapped within it. The outside world is too hostile to consider going into - one doorman who tried it returned with PTSD and a heroin addiction.

Elsewhere, Ellis reimagines the Civil War underground railway as an unofficial relocation programme for beauty pageant contestants desperate to escape from their parents and the pressure of competition. Once again, she peers beneath the surface to acknowledge the 'army of pushers and pullers and toxic glue' responsible to maintaining the sheen of perfection. The escapees are placed with rich childless families. Reassuring one runaway, the driver says 'in New York City, no-one will ask you to lip sync 'It's a Hard Knock Life' or burn your neck with a curling iron'. Likewise, private school 'does sound hard, but it's not any harder than trying to tap-dance your entire family out of a trailer park'.

The author is not afraid to take a swipe at ‘women’s fiction’, as presented by the mainstream publishing industry. There are several dismissive references to the ‘three generations of women’ novel, reminiscent of Wilde’s swipes at the three volume novel in The Importance of Being Earnest. Elsewhere, she refers to the ‘Three A’s’ of women’s commercial fiction (‘adultery, abortion, anorexia'), and satirises a female author whose work in progress is being sponsored by Tampax (extra funds will be forthcoming for every time she mentions the product outside of its traditional usage – 'so I'll give one of my characters anxiety nosebleeds. And you know what's good for a character's verbally abusive husband's haemorrhoid surgery recovery?'). As the story develops, Tampax is shown to be an organisation as shadowy and intrusive as the FBI, capable of surveillance, kidnap and worse. 

Like Donald Antrim rewriting Jackie Collins, Helen Ellis exposes the savagery, anxiety and struggle which lies beneath the glossy exterior of American society with a cutting wit and a constantly surprising imagination. The short stories contained within American Housewife are small, well-aimed barbs at the casual violence of middle class life, and the hidden ruthlessness with which individuals maintain their positions within the hierarchy. The collection is weakened slightly by a couple of brief pieces which feel more like lists of tweets – while Ellis is can craft a memorable phrase, her writing is best when she lets her baroque tendencies run wild.