Reader Score
73%
73% of readers
recommend this book
The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist's couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a vast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful screenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tries to make sense of it all: doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.
Daphne Merkin is the author of Enchantment, a novel and Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays. Her cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including Vogue and The
American Scholar, and has been widely anthologized. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, and is currently a contributing writer at Elle and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York City, where she teaches writing, and is at work on a memoir, Melancholy Baby.
Jessica White is a writer.
Overall, this is a very, very good look at emotional manipulation. It allows a lot of room for how women who are caregivers and are unhappy in their marriages can be made to feel, and how they often don’t know how to express this unhappiness without coming off like a nag.
CONSTELLATIONS (essays) | THIS WOMAN’S WORK: Essays on Music w/@kimletgordon | HAGSTONE (novel) April ‘24 @4thEstate | Agent: Peter Straus @rcwlitagency She/Her
@JohannaTC Motherhood by Sheila Heti, Pit Lullabies by @JessicaTraynor6, The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer, Expecting by @Chitgrrl, Nelson’s The Argonauts, Republic of Motherhood by @MissLizBerry, Rivka Galchen's Little Labors. And this superb @claudiadey essay https://t.co/Vy4nzmAryO
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'This 1952 novel of domestic discontent in postwar Rome is sure to be hailed as a lost feminist classic to rival Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.' Thank you @LucyScholes for featuring Forbidden Notebook in @prospect_uk! Out 03/23. https://t.co/gzDgUkmVIm
"A strange, fresh, gripping book. One of the the many achievements of The Pumpkin Eater is that it somehow manages to find universal truths in what was hardly an archetypal situation: Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy, so that what we're asked to look at is frequently red-raw and painful without being remotely self-dramatizing. In fact, there's a dreaminess to some of the prose that is particularly impressive, considering the tumult that the book describes."
--Nick Hornby, The Believer