81. Hilma Wolitzer — Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everybody! Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers, or in today's case, celebrating the almost-forgotten work of a woman writer we think deserves a lot more recognition. I'm Kim Askew... 

AMY HELMES: ... and I'm Amy Helmes, and that's right, Kim. Today's lost lady isn't exactly lost. She's a well- respected writer who, at age 92, is alive and well, living in Manhattan and still writing, in fact. But a collection of her short stories were lost, so to speak, until quite recently. And Kim, I keep thinking back to our very first episode on this podcast when we sort of spelled out our mission statement, which was something to the effect of, "This author is incredible. Why hadn't we heard of her before? People should be reading her." And those are exactly the thoughts that came to mind when I think about our subject today, Hilma Wolitzer. She ought to be more of a household name. 

KIM: Yes, she should. And specifically anyone who is or has a mother would appreciate this new, but old, collection by Hilma Wolitzer. It's called Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. Talk about a title that stops you in your tracks, right Amy? 

AMY: Yeah, no kidding. I mean, as soon as I heard that, I'm like, "Yes, please." And if you're itching to know more, we've got an exciting surprise for you today because we reached out to Hilma Wolitzer herself, and she agreed to join us for today's episode to talk about it. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, Amy, what the heck are we waiting for? Let's raid the stacks and get started.

[intro music]

AMY: Our guest today is the accomplished and award-winning writer, Hilma Wolitzer. A self-described late bloomer, her first novel Ending was published in 1974 when she was 44 years old. And incidentally, that's a book that loosely inspired Bob Fosse's 1979 film All That Jazz. Wolitzer has since published 13 books, including the 2012 novel An Available Man.

KIM: She's received honors and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also taught creative writing at Columbia University, NYU, the Breadloaf Writer's Conference and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. 

AMY: She's an inspiration for a new generation of writers, I think, and in one sense, you could say that quite literally. Her daughter is bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, who actually had an instrumental role in bringing her mom's latest story collection to the light of day. The book was published just last summer to great critical acclaim, earning raves from authors like Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, Tayari Jones, and Gail Godwin.

KIM: In addition, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket was named an NPR Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editor's choice, a People magazine Book of the Week, and a Kirkus Fully Booked Editor's Pick. Electric Literature named it the best short story collection of the year. Hilma Wolitzer, we are so excited to talk to you today. Welcome to the show. 

HILMA WOLITZER: Thank you for inviting me. 

AMY: Okay. So as we said, your book came out last summer, but Kim and I didn't catch wind of it until a previous guest on our show, author Anne Zimerman, mentioned it on Instagram. She is the biographer of MFK Fisher. We had her on, maybe Kim, about four months ago I think?

KIM: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

AMY: Here's what she had to say about the book. "Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Hilma Wolitzer is, I think, one of the best books I've ever read in my life. Like permanent place in the special stack kind of good. It's a collection of short stories, mostly from the 1960s/ early seventies about domestic life, marriage, mothering, and the particular restlessness that being a woman in the world inspires. It is SO GOOD. [All caps.] And unfortunately for me, at least, proves that the more things change, the more things stay the same. Update the fashion and other specific details and any of these stories could be written now." So Hilma, I think that's the first time you're hearing that. 

HILMA: Yes, it is! I'm thrilled! 

AMY: How does it feel to be getting such effusive praise like that for these stories, some of which were written half a century ago? 

HILMA: More than half a century ago. The oldest one is now 56 years old, the title story. It's surprising and very gratifying. I must say what pleases me the most is hearing from both young people and from men, as well, because the stories focus so much on the women's interior lives. The point of view is usually female in the stories, and I'm getting really positive feedback from men. And even though the stories are, most of them, are quite old, I'm getting very good feedback from young women as well. 

KIM: That's wonderful. Um, I'd love to hear a little bit more about how this recent book came about. I know the stories have been previously published most of them, in various magazines, right? So what prompted them getting back out there into the world? 

HILMA: Well, it had to do inadvertently with COVID. My husband and I both came down with it at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. It's almost two years now, which is hard to believe. We were hospitalized in separate hospitals, and he died two days before I was released from the hospital. And I came home feeling really ill and devastated and very sad, and my daughter, Meg, had been looking at the stories while I was in the hospital and she decided that they would be a good collection and she approached me about it. And I just wasn't interested. I was too sad. I was too sick. Um, I was in mourning. Uh, I really didn't want to do it and she pursued it. She even pursued it with my agent. She petitioned him to look at them as a collection. And after a while, I began to think, “I need something to do and I need something to look forward to,” which was very hard at that particular period. And then putting the stories together and writing the new one, especially writing the new one, became a way of grieving. Because the usual ways of grief, even, were just not available. I never saw my husband when he was dying. Nobody saw him. Nobody saw me afterward. The family didn't get together. I mean, we spoke on the phone, but nobody put his or her arms around anyone. And, uh, my husband was cremated, nobody was there to see him off. It was just a terribly sad time and it didn't seem real. That was part of it. It seemed that he hadn't died, but that he had just vanished. And writing about it gave it reality. And though it was painful. It led me to acceptance. 

AMY: Yes. And so that story that you wrote, it sort of caps off this collection and I'm so sorry for your loss. I can't imagine going through any of that. Um, and sadly, there are people out there that can relate to it because a lot of people have had to go through it in the past few years. Um, but in terms of the stories themselves, these earlier stories, did you have any apprehensions about introducing them to modern readers in the sense that you know, they are old stories? Did you worry, "Oh, they might be too dated?"

HILMA: Yeah, I did worry about it. Uh, you know, in the stories, nobody has a computer. Nobody has an iPhone. Um, the women in the stories mostly don't even have jobs. That's how dated they were. And I think my editor was a little concerned about this as well, but I came up with a solution by putting the date that the story was published after each story. And that put them in perspective. I think. 

AMY: Well, first of all, it didn't occur to me at all the lack of technology.... anything like that wasn't problematic to me. And in terms of the women not necessarily having careers or they're not being mentioned in the stories, that didn't bother me either. And it made me think, you know, yes, the majority of women today have careers, but it doesn't mean that we don't still also have this life that you were writing about. It doesn't replace the domestic life, you know? We can have jobs and then we still have all this stuff going on at home. We just happen to have both now. 

KIM: Especially during COVID too, because a lot of women were home with their families and really immersed in, you know … even if they're still working, a lot of us have been home.

AMY: And I lost my job during COVID, so I went back to, "Okay, I'm vacuuming now. I'm doing, you know, I'm doing that sort of stuff." Like, "Oh my God, here I am." So anyway, we want to talk about the stories in this book a little more, but first I wanna know about your backstory. You were born in Brooklyn in 1930. Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer even, as a little girl?

HILMA: Well, as a little girl I wrote really bad poetry. And, uh, I did not grow up in a literary household. My parents were respectful of any creative effort that their children had, but there were hardly any books around. But then, uh, one day my mother went to school for a parent-teacher conference. I was in the fourth grade and she came home glowing and she said to my father, "Do you know what Ms. Fredericks said? She said Hilma shows great promise." And from that moment on, they took these little poems I was writing more seriously. In fact, they had me recite them when they had their weekly card game with their friends. These poor people really just wanted to deal out and next hand, and instead they had to listen to this kid in her pajamas reading these awful poems and then applaud afterward. And that felt very good. And I felt that it was really due to this parent- teacher conference with Ms. Fredericks. And then believe it or not, about 50 years later, I was a published writer and I was giving a reading in a library in Montclair, New Jersey, and a little old woman came up to me after the reading. And she said, "You won't remember me, but I was your fourth grade teacher, Ms. Fredericks." And I started gushing. I just said, "I'm so grateful to you. You really jump-started my career by getting my parents to be encouraged about my writing. You told my mother that I showed great promise." And she said, "Oh, honey, I told that to all the mothers." Really put me in my place.

KIM: But what a wonderful woman!

AMY: And that just goes to show the power of words, because whether she meant it or not, it did change your life, you know? It did encourage you. So... 

KIM: And it's lovely that your parents actually took it to heart and wanted to show you off to their friends. That's so sweet. 

HILMA: I think that all children are born with talent and it's either encouraged or knocked out of them. 

KIM: Mm-hmm mm-hmm yeah. 

AMY: Speaking of talented kids, uh, is it true that you also went to high school with Maurice Sendak? 

HILMA: Yes, not only did I go to high school with him, but we shared a desk in major art. I started out as a visual artist, and Maurice was already doing marvelous drawings for the high school literary magazine. It was a rather tough high school in Brooklyn. (I think it's since been closed.) And years later, Maurice and I shared the same editor, and there was a dinner party in honor of the editor. And I sat next to Maurice. He was just as unhappy in high school as I was; we both couldn't wait to get out. And I said, "Maurice, you and I graduated, and everyone else was sent up the river!" That was such a tough high school. 

AMY: And then you did not attend college after that, right? 

HILMA: No, I did not go to college. I was 16. Maurice was 18 when we graduated. I was 16. I couldn't wait to get out into the workforce, unprepared to do anything. I became a file clerk, um, a bookkeeping machine operator. Even before that, when I was 13 in the summertime, I worked under the boardwalk in Coney Island, renting beach shares and umbrellas. Um, I worked in a place that made these sort of Swan Lake feathered head dresses for women. My job was to steam the feathers, and because I was such a daydreamer, I burnt most of them and then I would just open the window and throw them out, not realizing that they were drifting past my boss's window on a lower floor. So I was quickly fired from that job. 

KIM: I love that imagery. That's great. 

AMY: Totally. 

HILMA: But I feel all this experience is useful, even if you don't use it directly. It gives you a sense of... well, a sense of irony and a sense of humor about yourself. 

AMY: Yeah. More life experiences than if you're just following the traditional route of everyone else sitting in a college classroom.

HILMA: I wish I had sat in a college classroom. I see that my daughters' education really made a difference in the way they not only viewed the world, but the way they read books. I mean, I was reading Jane Austen in my forties, and one of my daughters said, "Oh, mom, that's much better. You're coming into it as a mature person." I said, "No, I think it's much better to come to it first as a young person being guided by a mature person." 

AMY: But you did start taking writing classes then? 

HILMA: Yes, I began taking a writing workshop at the New School when I was in my mid thirties, married with two children, with Anatole Broyard, who then became a daily book reviewer for The New York Times. At first, it was a terrible experience. I had to get a big babysitter. I had to get to the city on the Long Island railroad. We were living in the suburbs then. And, um, the classroom was very crowded, and he had read all of our stories, and he called on me first in this crowded classroom to come to the front of the room and read my story aloud. I was super shy. I was very embarrassed, especially when he asked me to spit out my gum. I think I spit it into my pocketbook because I had no place else to put it. Uh, and I read the story very quickly, hyperventilating without any affect at all. And then I collapsed into my seat and Anatole called upon the other people to comment on the story, and a man in the front row raised his hand and said, "That was the most boring thing I've ever heard."

AMY: The opposite of Ms. Fredericks. 

HILMA: Yeah. Yeah. I was ready to just pack it in, go home and just be a housewife forever and ever, but Anatole came to the rescue. He passed me a note, which I still have 32 years after his death, and it says, "The story is fine. See me later." And then he said to my critic, "You're perfectly entitled to dislike the story, but you have an obligation to tell the writer why and how you think she might make it better." And in that moment, I understood revision and teaching, the balance of honesty and charity that's necessary when you lead a class in anything creative. And he saw me later and put me into an advanced class and the following week, he had me read the story to that advanced class. And they didn't like it either, but they gave me constructive criticism. So I felt less shattered. Just slightly less shattered, frankly, but, but less shattered. And eventually the story was published. 

AMY: That's amazing. 

KIM: That's incredible. And what was the first story?

HILMA: Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.  

KIM: Okay? Yes, so that was the story

AMY: Oh, it was that story! 

KIM: Okay. So you were already drawing from, I guess, the suburban life you were living and pulling it into your stories from your first story, right?

HILMA: Yes.

KIM: Wow. That's so fascinating. 

HILMA: I mean, I was raised to be a domestic goddess. I was raised by a housewife to be a housewife. And I assume that I had to do this. This was my job, was to get married and have children and make jello molds. And I was putting so much creativity into my domestic life. My children always had homemade, from scratch birthday cakes that were decorated until they collapsed. They had homemade Halloween costumes. They had tuna fish men, not tuna fish sandwiches. Tuna fish men had carrot stick, arms and olive eyes. And I just had to do it that way. The whole family was sort of relieved when I began to write and was using that creative energy somewhere else, leaving them alone.

KIM: That's great. 

AMY: Um, it was kind of surreal the day that I discovered your book. First of all, it was just a few days after I had watched the film The Lost Daughter. And so I was texting back and forth with mom friends of mine, because everybody was kind of in a tizzy over this movie because it brought up so many emotions for everybody who's a parent, uh, or everybody who's a mother, I should say. So we were texting back and forth, and one of my friends was like, "Oh, I'm gonna go read The Lost Daughter. And I realized she was really into this idea of books about motherhood. And I had said to her, "You should read Meg Wolitzer's The Ten-Year Nap, because that was a book that was, for me, really thought-provoking about motherhood in the same way. And then later that night, I saw Anne Zimerman's post about your book. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." At first I didn't even make the connection. I just thought, "This sounds like a book I want to read." And then I saw the last name Wolitzer, and I was like, "Wait, what? How is this possible?"

HILMA: There aren't many people by that name. 

AMY: No, exactly. But it made me realize, I think women are starving for art and literature that speaks frankly about the experience of being a woman, and specifically, motherhood. What are your thoughts on that? Do you agree? 

HILMA: Yeah, I do. This is partly why I think the stories are still timely, because women are still struggling with these issues; wanting to be the best wife, the best mother, but at the same time, have something else in their lives. They're restless in the same way that I was restless, in the same way that my characters are restless about their lives. I loved being a wife, being a mother of young children. I adored it. It was so much fun, but at the same time, I did feel that I wanted to do something else. And eventually I discovered it was writing. And had I not been in Anatole's class and had I not had the good fortune to get an agent in the strangest possible way, I might never have had a career. Because I didn't know any writers. The town we lived in in the suburbs didn't even have a bookstore. I had never met another writer before I took that class. I had never taken even an English literature class past high school. So I wrote this first short story, and my husband, who was not exactly thrilled with this switch of my violating the contract that I'd signed to be a wife and mother only, uh, suddenly I was doing something else that was really taking up a lot of my concentration, but I showed him the story, and I said, "Is this a story?" I was uneducated, but he had a PhD and he had a lot of literature classes behind him. He was a psychologist and he said, "Why don't you send this?" And he mentioned the name of a friend who was a critic and an artist and who we both thought was very astute, "and see what he thinks of the story." And he read the story, and then he put it in his pocket and went to a party where he ran into a literary agent. It happened to be John Steinbeck's agent, and he gave her the story and she called me the next day and said, "I'd like to represent you." But she was like a fairy godmother. Overnight, I'd gone from the cinders into the beautiful coach and I was a writer, and I couldn't believe it. I went into the bathroom and I tried on scarves and things to see if I looked more like a writer. And then I felt an obligation to keep writing, and I bombarded her with stories and they were rejected. Um, And the rejections... it's good for writers to be rejected because once you get past that and you're still writing, you know that you're a writer, um, that you're not in it for the money or for any modicum of fame. But I did find that other people judged you. You feel like a writer, but other people do not think of you as a writer unless you're published 

AMY: Mm-hmm . 

HILMA: And when I published that first story and it was to The Saturday Evening Post, which was a very important magazine in those days, I remember telling my parents about it. And my parents used to call me all the time in stereo on two different phones. And, uh, my mother would say, you know, "What are you doing today?" And I would say, "I'm writing a short story." And she would just not respond to that. She would say, "What are you making for dinner?" But when I sold that story and I called them and I got so much money for that story... our income was extremely modest at that point. My husband was a school psychologist and I wasn't working. I was like the women in my stories. I didn't have a car. I was living in the suburbs with two children. My husband's working a couple of jobs to make ends meet. So the car was never around except on Sundays when I went to the laundromat and to the supermarket. And I walked everywhere. The afternoon that I sold that story to The Saturday Evening Post, I went right across the street to the Rambler dealer and put a down payment on a car. So in a sense, writing brought me freedom as well. 

AMY: I love that story and yeah, that does bring up another question, because you said your time was very limited. You had three kids? Three? Two?

HILMA: Two kids. And we happened to live so close to the school that they came home for lunch. So I never had a full day. But the thing was, I stopped making tuna fish men. They get tuna fish sandwiches and I'd go right back to the typewriter. The typewriter was at the end of the kitchen table. My older daughter said she loved the sound of that as she was going to sleep of my typewriter. I wasn't neurotic then about privacy and quiet. We had a dog. The dog would be barking or needed to go out. The children would be fighting. The phone would be ringing. Everything was going on, and I could interrupt the flow of thought and then go right back to it. Of course that changed. 

AMY: Yeah, I was gonna say, I wish I could have that ability because that's one of the, the biggest challenges is when, you know, you have 20 minutes, say, to feel like, "Can I use that 20 minutes creatively and, and really dive into something?" And I always feel like my brain can't, you know? 

HILMA: Yeah. It was really hard. People said, "Did you have a, a routine? Did you write three hours a day? Did you write in the morning?" The minute I got out of bed, I would rush to the typewriter. Amy Tan refers to it as "going from dream to dream," which I think is very apt, because sometimes you are thinking about the story in your sleep and the characters would wake me up. I mean, they would say, "Hurry up! This is what I wanna say." And I'd have to get there and put it down. And it was very thrilling, and I could work like that. Once everybody was out of the house, I could work like that and then suddenly look up and it was dark out. I mean, I would get up to go to the bathroom or the kitchen in between, but you lose yourself completely. Even now, when I was writing the final story in this book, I was 90- years old and I forgot how old I was until I passed a mirror. I mean, you just, you lose yourself in the fictional universe so much. So that story is more autobiographical than my other stories. So people think your work is autobiographical, which is a great compliment. There's that willing suspension of disbelief. 

AMY: Yeah, I will admit when I started reading the stories, I thought for sure they were autobiographical. It's hard not to; they feel so real. The one that really struck me as, "Oh, she for sure lived this," was "Photographs," which was about pregnancy and childbirth because, well, first of all, it's completely wild and hilarious, which is perfect because the experience of childbirth is so absurd and hilarious in a lot of ways. But I thought, "I can't imagine, imagine somebody writing this that hadn't experienced it."

HILMA: Yeah, I definitely used some of my own experience there. The screaming part.

AMY: Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The chaos involved in that whole delivery. Um, but I loved, there's one particular line from that story where the narrator is at an obstetrician's appointment and you write "other pregnant women in the doctor's waiting room and I smiled knowingly at one another. We found ourselves in a vast and ancient sorority without the rituals of pledging." And I love that because I feel like it kind of sums up what your stories offer, which is that sort of communal joy and comfort. Like you're belonging to this ancient club of women who have also been there and kind of experienced what you've experienced.

HILMA: That's good. I do feel that though we live in families I think we also live in communities and we live in the world. This pandemic has proved that to me, because though I felt somewhat isolated because of being quarantined, I still felt so many other people around the world were having the same experiences. I felt somewhat comforted by this. And I think this is what you get from reading books. You like, you try to find some universality in the characters, but they also have to be idiosyncratic. It can't be a book about every woman or every man. I'm hoping every woman and every man will find something of himself or herself in the book, but the stories have to be about particular people. And they're not me, and they're not my husband, generally speaking. Uh, the stories that repeat in this volume about Paulette and Howard are completely invented. 

KIM: The stories in your book, they're a combination of poignant, funny, relatable, as we've been talking about. Also unsettling and even haunting, at times. We wanted to talk about the title story from the book, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. As you said, it was first published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine, and that was in 1966. The narrator encounters a woman at the supermarket who is having a breakdown. She's practically catatonic. You write: "She gripped the handle of her empty cart and said ‘There is no end to it.’ It was spoken so simply and undramatically, but with such honest conviction that for a moment, I thought that she was referring to the aisle of the supermarket. Perhaps it was blocked ahead of us and she couldn't move up farther. But then she said, ‘I have tried and I have tried, and there's no end to it. Ask Harold. Ask anybody. Ask my mother.’” Do you remember what sparked you wanting to tell that particular story? 

HILMA: I have no idea. I'm sure that I felt the supermarket was the ideal place to talk about domestic angst because of, I think I describe it in the story, the bloody cuts of meat, the towering cans of Campbell's soup and so forth and so on. All the fancy Jell-O I was gonna make for my husband's colleagues' dinner parties. It all added up to the perfect atmosphere for a story about a woman losing it. 

KIM: Yeah. It's unforgettable I mean, no wonder your writing instructor was like, "This is a writer here." 

AMY: It's more than "fine." 

KIM: Yeah. I'll never forget reading that story for the first time. 

AMY: So I also loved, "there is no end to it" -- that reminded me totally off topic, but the series "Downton Abbey," my very favorite line from "Downton Abbey" is when the dowager Maggie Smith, she's talking about children and she says, "Oh, children, it's just the on and on-ness of it." That exactly sums up the experience of having children is like, for better and for worse. It's the on and on-ness, there is no end to it. That feeling, you know? 

KIM: Yeah. Yep. 

HILMA: You sort of have them wantonly, uh, and in my generation you had them because you were supposed to. Now women make choices. Um, some people have children, some people don't. My 97- year- old sister, she talks about the old lady who's asked if she had to do all over again, if she would have children. She said, "Yes, but not these children."

KIM: That's hilarious. 

HILMA: Yeah, but I don't feel that way. I love my children. My children are marvelous. They got me through everything. 

KIM: Hilma's children, if you're listening, you're okay. You're good in her book. Um, so were these stories more subversive, do you think, in the Sixties and Seventies when you first wrote them than they are today? I can imagine maybe an audience 50 years ago might have been shocked when you were supposed to pretend like everything was just fine and dandy, but today, you know, we're starting to have these more honest conversations, I think, on the subject. 

HILMA: Yes, and actually my daughter, Meg, pointed this out to me. She said, "Mom, these are such nervy stories!" And I realized that I may have been hiding behind these stories. I was the angry person. I was a nervy person who wanted to talk out, who wanted to curse and so forth and so on. And instead I did it subliminally through the stories and I, I didn't realize it, but when the kids showed me this and said, "I can't believe you wrote this!" in fact, one of my kids said that, uh, after my novel Ending came out, there's a, a very graphic sex scene in the book. And she said she was so embarrassed in high school when boys would sort of taunt her about her mother's sex scene in the book. I understood her embarrassment. 

KIM: Yeah. Uh, I can't wait to read Ending. I've only read this collection, so I can't wait to read more of your books. I wanted to ask about your revising, because you said that one of your favorite parts of writing is actually revising. Why is that? 

HILMA: Well, first of all, you're not facing a blank page or a blank screen. You're not starting from nothing. You have something in front of you. There are two type of writers. There are writers who overwrite and there are writers who underwrite. And they're not insurance brokers, but they don't write enough. Um, and I found out the kind of writer I was when I was taking this course in sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum. The first thing they gave me was a little piece of soapstone. And I thought, you know, like Michelangelo, I'm gonna release the figure from the stone by chiseling away at it. And the next thing I know, I had a pile of dust. I chiseled it all the way down. And then when they gave us clay the following week, I built up, and I actually had a portrait of someone. And I realized that I was somebody who would write the minimum and have to add. So I would pull my pages out of the typewriter, or print them now, and sit down or get into bed or wherever I wanted to go with a pencil and just add things. This was very pleasurable. And reading your work aloud really helps you hear what's missing and what is too much. 

AMY: Well, I want to read something aloud from your story "Nights." This is a story about insomnia, and as someone who experiences insomnia almost nightly, it really struck a chord. 

KIM: I get a lot of emails from Amy that are dated like 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM when I wake in the morning. 

HILMA: I am an insomniac as well.

AMY: So, okay, okay. So first I'm gonna read, this is the narrator awake in the middle of the night: "A song I have not heard in years comes into my head. First I'm mouth, the words. Then I try to whisper the tune. But my voice is throaty and full.

“Shhhh,” Howard warns in his sleep. 

Oh, think, think. Come up with something else. But the song is stuck there. Doo-be doo dee-dee, a song I never really liked. I try to overwhelm it with something symphonic. So, this is what I've come to, I think, and the song leaves my head like a bird from a tree. Instantly other birds flock in: shopping lists, the 20/20 line on the eye chart, a chain letter to which I never responded. Do not break the chain or evil will befall your house. Continue it and long life and good health will be yours to enjoy and cherish. In eight weeks you will receive 1,120 picture postcards from all over the world. 

Will I?

Learned men wear copper bracelets. My mother weeps over broken mirrors. Hearts are broken, bones. They crack in the silence of the night." 

So to me, that kind of stream-of-conscious, manic feel to the story exactly mimics the way my brain works when I wake up. You totally nailed it. I find myself being like, "Why are you thinking this? This is so random. This is such a nonsequitor stop, stop!" I'm trying to will my brain to stop. And I think moms, in particular, have this sort of mental load that kind of spills over so that in the wee hours of the morning you're still thinking all of these things. Um, but yes, wanted to find out, are you sleeping better at this point in your life? Tell me there's hope. 

HILMA: I'm afraid not. I think part of it is not letting go of the day, and part of it is dreading the next day. I sleep very well if I don't have anything planned the next day, but if I have something planned, I start thinking about it when I'm in bed, you know? What am I going to do? Will I need an umbrella? Uh, stupid thoughts. 

AMY: Yeah. Stupid thoughts. Yeah. 

HILMA: They don't even make sense. I can't meditate for the same reason. When I start to meditate, I keep thinking. And I remember my older grandson saying when he was about four years- old, "Grandma, I have thoughts all day long." And I was so thrilled. I said, "This is the beginning of consciousness," never realizing or never remembering how difficult consciousness could be, how overwhelming it could be with flights of ideas coming into your head. 

AMY: Yes. Like birds. And I've since kind of flipped the script, and I welcome it in a weird way, like, okay, this is my time of night. So I'm able to have a different perspective on it now, basically. But I just, I love the story because it just really felt like my experience. 

HILMA: Thank you. And I think insomnia is something that seems to run in families too, I've noticed. So there may be something genetic to it as well, but I think that your mind is just working on overtime.

KIM: I feel like as the years go by, I'm turning more and more into an insomniac myself, but I've not gotten to the point where Amy is. I don't see it as a gift yet, but I'm gonna try to do that. 

HILMA: Don't hang around with Amy. It's catching. 

AMY: Yes, yes. The award for best opening sentence, I think, in this book has to be from a story called "The Sex Maniac." It starts off, "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." 

KIM: That narrator in that line. Ugh. It's so good.

AMY: It's such a good story. There's another story where the narrator's husband has been arrested for indecent exposure. Um, that was also quite a ride. But you also, in other stories, write about nakedness as sort of the ultimate vulnerability I'm thinking of in "Mother," which is just really an anguishing, yet beautiful, story. You write: "The very worst thing, she was certain, was not human misery, but it's nakedness, and the naked witness of others." So I'm wondering, does writing ever feel like a form of nakedness to you? Because you have said that you were quite shy at one point in your life?

HILMA: Yeah, I, I think it does. And I don't mind exposing myself, if you pardon the expression, of, especially in that final story, which is not about my husband and me; it's about Howard and Paulette, but I assign what happened to Morty and me to these fictional characters. And many of the details are really, really true. 

KIM: Yeah. Which is a loosely fictionalized account of your pandemic experience and losing your husband Morty to COVID. You dedicate this book to him, and we're so sorry for your loss. Um, we wanted to know why you felt it was important to end the book with that particular story.

HILMA: Well, when we collected the other stories, it was a slim volume, and I felt it needed to be beefed up. But I also felt compelled to write this final story. Um, it just seemed I had to put it down, and this has never happened to me before, except, maybe, that childbirth scene, um, where I felt it was necessary. But here, as I said, it was a way of grieving as well. And, um, what was amazing to me, I had stopped writing fiction. I was writing poems again in my old age. Uh, actually getting them published in good little literary magazines. And I was satisfied with that. My husband and I had a good, companionable life in our old, old age, and then this happened and it seemed really important to write about it. But it was wrenching to write about it. And it was cathartic at the same time. And the amazing thing was how all my recent attempts at writing fiction had failed. I would start something and it wouldn't go anywhere. When I began this story, I couldn't type fast enough. It was sort of almost as if I was taking dictation. My characters aren't real, but they are like neighbors who've moved away and I wonder what happened to them. And so I've always wondered what happened to Howard and Paulette, so to use my own experience and to find out what happened to them that way seemed so appropriate. They always had parallel lives. They weren't our lives, but they had parallel lives. They were the same age as my husband and myself, and I had to bring them to old age. I, I want to write one more worry about Paulette. Uh, and I want to write about widowhood. I hate the word "widow." I was thinking the other day, that it's "window" with the N knocked out, which takes away the light that comes through the window. It's a dark word. And I don't like it. Uh, I feel more that I'm a married woman without a husband.

AMY: Mm-hmm would you be with, to read a short passage from "The Great Escape?" 

HILMA: Yes, I'll read the very opening. 

AMY: Okay. 

HILMA: "I used to look at Howard first thing in the morning to see if he was awake, too, and if he wanted to get something going before, one of the kids crashed into the room and plopped down between us like an Amish bundling board. Lately though, with the children long grown and gone to their own marriage beds, I found myself glancing over to see if Howard was still alive, holding my breath while I watched for the shallow rise and fall of his, the way I had once watched for a promising rise in the bedclothes. 

Whenever I saw that he was breathing and that the weather waited just behind the blinds to be let in, I felt an irrational surge of happiness. Another day! And then another and another and another. Breakfast, vitamins, bills, argument, blood pressure pills, lunch, doctor, cholesterol medicine, the telephone, supper, TV, sleeping pills, sleep, waking. It seemed as if it would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful away. But of course it wouldn't; everyone knows that. T

There were running death jokes in our family. My father, driving past a cemetery: “Everybody's dying to get in.” My mother: “Death must be great — nobody ever comes back.” Howard's mother: “When one of us dies, I'm going to Florida.” That would've been funny, except that she actually meant it. Now, none of them was laughing or ever coming back." 

AMY: Thank you for sharing that with us. 

HILMA: Now, I promise you the story gets funny. 

AMY: No, it really does. It gets funny and then it gets sad again. Yeah. Um, it makes me think though, a, I am excited to hear that you are at least gonna write one more about... Paula or Paulette? 

HILMA: It's Paulette, and then she's called Paulie.

AMY: Okay. Oh, okay. Got it. Um, But given the critical success of this book that just came out, I'm also wondering if you maybe have any other old writing hiding in a drawer somewhere that might still see the light of day. Are you holding out on us? 

HILMA: No, no, no. I don't think so. I, uh, I'm afraid to look because if I find something that I like and I didn't include in this collection, I'll really feel bad.

KIM: I love what you just read. It reminded me of my grandmother. She lived to a hundred-ish. She used to say, "I'm afraid all my friends are gonna think that I got sent to the other place," and she'd point down, "It's taken me so long for me to get up there." So yeah, I mean, you know, she meant it with a sense of humor. So...

HILMA: Yes, I know. You've gotta have it. You have to, I mean, um, you have no choice. If you want to have any friends, you can't keep complaining and you can't keep, uh, expressing dread. The dread may be there, but it's not there all the time. You're so easily distracted by life. I mean, somebody asked me the other day what my superpower is and my superpower is curiosity. I can't wait to find out what happens next, even though everything in the newspapers is usually horrible and has been certainly for a few years. I'm so curious and this, I think, keeps me going. I want to find out what happened and, and I think that's one of the reasons I read, one of the reasons I write, and one of the reasons I get up in the morning. I'm always surprised when I get up in the morning, please and surprised, no matter how stiff or lousy I feel. It's another day. 

AMY: You seem like you could be in your seventies. 

KIM: I know, absolutely!

HILMA: What I really love is people who say, "Oh, you don't look 92. You look no more than 88." Like, who would wanna look 88?! I might as well look 92! Seventies is pretty good. I considered myself still sexy in my seventies.

KIM: Well, you make 92 look amazing. 

HILMA: It doesn't feel horrible to be 92. And especially when you can still read and go into other people's lives and other universes to expand the one you're living in now. I mean, it is different. Um, I walk as if I'm drunk sometimes , um, 

KIM: I do you that too. 

HILMA: You keep on trucking. I wrote a poem about it that was published in a lovely journal called Women's Review of Books. Katha Pollitt was the poetry editor, and I wrote a poem about it. The beginning was something like, um, "Sometimes I tell myself don't just lie there. Keep moving." And that's how the poem starts, and that's actually how I feel in the morning. I have this idea that if I keep moving, I'll keep moving. Yeah, it's an illusion or delusion, but it, it feels right. And it feels optimistic, which I want to keep being. 

KIM: So you're obviously still reading a lot, it sounds like. And that's, you know, one of your great pleasures. Are there any other lost ladies of lit that you can think of that you might wanna give a shout out to for our listeners? 

HILMA: Yes. Some of them are living and some of them are dead. Um, among the living is Lori Siegel who is now I think 90 or so a terrific writer. Other People's Houses is one of her books. And another one is My First American. Marvelous books. Another one is someone I have only read. I know Lori and we taught together once at Breadloaf and I’ve known her a long time, but somebody named Nancy Huddleston Packer, P A C K E R, who is still alive. She's in her nineties. Uh, I think the book is called Small Moments. Absolutely marvelous to me. She was right up there with John Updike and John Cheever, uh, in her writing and her daughter, by the way, is Ann Packer, who's The Dive From Clausen's Pier... she’s a wonderful writer herself. This is her mother. A nonfiction writer who I love, and she's not lost yet, but she may become lost unless we keep talking about her, is Jenny Diski. I don't know if you've read her. D I S K I. She's British. Her essays are brilliant. Some of the best essays I've ever read. Talk about light and darkness in one sentence. She's really terrific. Um, Elizabeth Taylor, not the actress, but the British writer Elizabeth Taylor, who I had the pleasure of reviewing a book that turned out, unfortunately, to be a posthumous book, her first posthumous publication called Blaming. But, um, I went on to read Mrs. Paulfrey at the Claremont and a collection of stories called The Devastating Boys. Just a brilliant, wonderful writer. And then, uh, a really good friend of mine named Bharati Mukherjee. She wrote a book called Wife. Not my daughter's The Wife, but just Wife, which is really good. And she was married to a Canadian writer named Clark Blaise and together they wrote a memoir called Days and Nights in Calcutta. She's really just a wonderful writer. And I love that Lucia Berlin came back into..

AMY: Yes. I actually wanted to ask you about her because you guys were kind of writing across the same timeframe. 

HILMA: I think she's more imaginative and more innovative than I am. I just love her work. Those scenes in the laundromat.

KIM: Uh, mm-hmm , they're incredible. Just amazing. 

HILMA: Yeah, she's really good. So there are lots of people out there, and then I have to give a shout out to one of my great friends, who's not a writer, but an ongoing actress in her nineties, Estelle Parsons. Estelle and I met in a coffee shop and we began talking and began sitting together, I would say about 10 years ago when we were only in our eighties. And we've been fast friends ever since. And Estelle is going to be in a movie. She's just preparing a new role in a new movie. She's an inspiration to me. 

KIM: She sounds incredible. It has been, I can't say… I'm gonna speak for both Amy and I, this has been an absolute joy to have this discussion with you today. We are just so happy we were able to read your work and we want to read more, and we feel so lucky we got to spend the last hour with you. Thank you so much.

HILMA: It was my pleasure. 

KIM: And we can't wait to read the next story about Paulette.

HILMA: Well, I can't wait for you to read it. I can't wait to write it. Good luck with your kids. 

KIM: Thank you. 

HILMA: And your careers. 

KIM: Thank you so much. Bye! 

AMY: Bye!

KIM: …She was incredible! I'm not that with it now, let alone at 92! 

AMY: I'm not either! 

KIM: Oh my gosh, she's sharp as a tack, that woman. 

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you haven't read Hilma's latest book Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, make buying it your first order of business after hitting stop on this podcast, please. It's that good. I also have her most recent novel An Available Man in my reading queue. And I can't wait to dive into that one, too. I am expecting a lot of humor in this one. 

KIM: I wanna read that now, too. Anyway, if you're enjoying this podcast, please tell a friend or several. You'll not only be helping us, but you'll also be giving other people the gift of great book recommendations and who doesn't want that?

AMY: Right, right. Until next week, bye everyone. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant lost. Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.