Week 9
Class Ground Rules
Read all the assignments before class.
Keep yourself on mute unless called on.
Raise your hands electronically.
Focus your comments only on the question at hand rather than straying to other parts of the story.
Refrain from offering a review of the whole story or jumping to the end.
Try to support your comments by referring to details from the text.
Listen to and respond to others with respect.
READ (at least twice): Hilma Wolitzer – “Today a Woman Went Mad at the Supermarket,” (from Today a Woman Went Mad at the Supermarket, 2021, Bloomsbury Publishing). PDF posted below.
A pregnant woman encounters a mother having a breakdown in the supermarket.
Think About:
Why Wolitzer chose a supermarket as the setting for this story.
The narrator and how her condition might affect how she views the woman having the breakdown.
Shirley Lewis and her distress.
Mr. A and his role in the story.
How the narrator feels after the incident and how she relates it to her husband.
“Writing fiction is a solitary occupation, but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.” — Hilma Wolitzer
Wolitzer - Today A Woman Went Mad.pdfPurely Optional: Listen to Meg Wolitzer interview her mother, Hilma Wolitzer.
Start listening at 49:10 by moving the slider (vertical line) in the file below.
Hilma Wolitzer Biography
Hilma Wolitzer's first published work, at age 9, was a poem in the Junior Inspector's Club Journal, sponsored by the New York City Department of Sanitation. She was in her 30s when her first short story was published, and 44 when her first novel came out. A devoted wife and mother, she fit writing in around her household tasks, typing manuscripts at the kitchen table and storing them in the freezer to protect them in case of fire. Read more...
