The novel expresses the deep frustrations of a housewife who is handcuffed to a humdrum husband. In Wifey, Sandy and Norman Pressman have two kids and a boring sex life. They get it on once a week, on Saturday nights, in their maid-tidied home in Plainfield, New Jersey. As lovers go, Norman is as predictable as they come: he climbs on top of Sandy, thrusts for “three to five minutes,” washes up afterward, and falls asleep. Foreplay isn’t really his thing. Sandy, who describes herself as “an adolescent at 32,” finds herself desperate to try something, or someone, new. Before she strays, she resolves to single-handedly spice things up in the bedroom. She buys a “pictorial sexual encyclopedia” and studies up before breaking out some new moves on Norman and getting on top of him. But Norman is resistant:
“What are you doing?”
“Let’s try it this way.”
“No, not with you on top.”
“It’s a very common position, Norm…”
“For dykes, for women’s libbers who want to take over.”
Sandy gives up and they have quick, missionary sex, just how Norman likes it. She’s left unsatisfied and a short time later, she’s having her first tipsy extramarital experience with her brother-in-law, who also happens to be her gynecologist. It’s pleasurable but ultimately disastrous, as is her next affair, with her best friend’s impotent husband (Sandy doesn’t feel quite as guilty about this one, as Lisbeth has an open marriage). She fantasizes about, and eventually reconnects with, her high school boyfriend Shep—the one she didn’t marry because he failed to impress her mother. In bed, Shep is just as exciting as she remembers, but he won’t leave his wife for her.
The language in the book really goes there. The good sex scenes read like sweaty romance novel fare, with Shep and his “silky mushroom” proving almost irresistible to Sandy. “I used to know that [sex scenes] were good if I turned myself on while I was writing them,” Blume said at the New Yorker festival in October 2023.
And then there are the bad sexual encounters. When Lisbeth’s husband loses his erection, he ends up weeping in her arms. Early on in the book, she gripes that Norman prefers lovemaking to be as bland and antiseptic as possible. “That’s why I douche with vinegar… cunt vinaigrette… to make it more appetizing… you know, like browned chicken,” she jokes.
Sandy’s freewheeling summer comes to a screeching halt when she gets gonorrhea, without any idea who she caught it from. She has to tell Norman and then weather the consequences.
Wifey is a book about marriage and sexual fantasies, but it’s also a story about breaking free from the stranglehold of childhood programming. Throughout the book, Sandy’s inner monologue is mixed in with imagined commentary from her overbearing mom, Mona. Mona’s voice represents the part of Sandy that married Norman instead of Shep. “I won’t forbid you from seeing him, Sandy, but I want you to know how unhappy Daddy and I are about this,” Mona scolded her about dating Shep when she was younger. “He’s not the right kind of boy for you. He has no background. His mother scrubs floors. Did you know that?” She urges Sandy to reconsider “that nice boy who took you to the ball”—aka Norman Pressman. Sandy listens and thus, the frustrated housewife blames her mother for her unhappiness.
Mona is a widowed traditionalist. She’s well-intentioned, but without even thinking about it, she’s spent a lifetime indoctrinating her daughters into the old ways. Myra, the elder of her two girls, has grown up to embrace her wisdom. But Sandy—Sandy is at war with herself. Nearly every negative question she has regarding Norman and her lifestyle is countered by a broken-record answer from her inner Mona.
Marriage 101, by Mona: “Make his interests your interests. Make his friends, your friends. When he’s in the mood, you’re in the mood. Dress to please him. Cook to please him. What else matters? A happy husband is the answer to a happy life.” As Sandy’s dissatisfaction grows, her mother’s voice in her head gets louder. “Was she wrong to want more out of life?” Sandy wonders about herself. “She wasn’t sure. If he beat her, she could complain. If he drank, she could complain. If he ran around, she could complain. But Sandy had no real reason to complain… Nobody loves a kvetch [whiner], Mona had said. Remember that, Sandy… especially not a man who’s worked hard all day.”
In rejecting Norman, Sandy has no choice but to reject her mother, too. “Is this what my life is all about?” she thinks to herself one afternoon. “Driving the kids to and from school and decorating our final house? Oh Mother, dammit! Why did you bring me up to think that this was what I wanted?”
Sandy’s mother-in-law, Enid, is even worse. While Mona clearly loves her kids, Enid expresses nothing but resentment toward her two daughters-in-law. Norman’s brother is married to a woman named Arlene, who Enid casually describes behind her back as Miss Piss. When Sandy goes against Enid’s wishes and names her own daughter Jennifer, instead of Enid’s choice of Sarah, Sandy gets her own nickname: Miss High and Mighty. “To me she’ll always be Sarah, no matter what Miss High and Mighty calls her,” Enid says of her new grandchild. Stubbornly, she stays true to her word. Years later, Jennifer is spending the summer at sleepaway camp and Enid still addresses her letters to Sarah Pressman, much to Jennifer’s annoyance.
Enid is also the source of one of Sandy and Norman’s biggest challenges—their house in Plainfield, New Jersey. The couple bought it from Enid after Norman’s father died. But the neighborhood is becoming predominantly Black and now Norman wants to sell it before property values plummet. The problem is, Enid won’t let them sell her former home to a Black family. She has her own made-up epithet for Black people, too—ductla—which she uses instead of the Yiddish slur schvartza, claiming her version is sneakier. Enid’s unapologetic racism aligns Sandy and Norman, although they come at the issue from different directions—Sandy is bothered by the moral implications, while Norman’s concerns are financial in nature.
The Pressmans’ all-white social circle is almost universally racist, and Plainfield’s demographic transition gives them all plenty of opportunities to out themselves. “They’re still different no matter how hard you try to pretend they’re not,” a woman at the club says of the Black families who are moving into the area. She warns Sandy: “I’d get out while the going’s good and move up to the Hills.” In another conversation, Gordon, Sandy’s brother-in-law, takes it even further. “The natives are restless everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before it really hits here,” he says over dinner in the city. “Remember the riots in Newark in ’67? Plainfield is next. You better get out before it’s too late.”
Beyond what these characters say, there’s never any indication that Plainfield is roiling with civil unrest. Blume uses racism as a shorthand for this wealthy community’s small-mindedness. Norman’s scheme to unload the house without upsetting Enid—sell to a Realtor, who will then turn around and sell it to a Black family—makes him look deceptive, and cowardly, in Sandy’s eyes. As she and Norman are signing the house over to Four Corners Realty Company, the representative assures them they’ll be covert about flipping the property. “Don’t worry Mr. Pressman, we’re known for our discretion at Four Corners,” he says. “We’ll bring our clients in after dark, on nights when you and the family are out.”
“Is that even legal?” Sandy interrupts.
“Damn right it’s legal!” Norman answers.
Despite their differences and Sandy’s sexual escapades, the couple stays together in the end, with all the security and sameness that entails. Even with her wandering heart, Sandy is still her mother’s daughter, with a lifetime of good-girl conditioning that she’s never quite able to shake. After Shep ends their affair, Sandy faces the truth—she was destined for suburban ennui, no matter what. “Marriage to him would have meant a life very much like the one I lead with Norman,” she thinks to herself about Shep. “Yes, a house in the suburbs, kids, car pools… Okay, so [sex] would have been better but after a while, even with him, it would probably have become routine.”
Neither Isadora Wing in Fear of Flying nor Bettina Balser in Diary of a Mad Housewife end up leaving their husbands, either. Isadora, after getting batted around like a cat toy by Adrian, shows up contrite in Bennett’s hotel room. Bettina experiences a marital miracle when Jonathan confesses he’s been talking to an analyst and has come to see himself, and not her, as the root of their problems.
Like Sandy, these women can still imagine happy endings alongside their spouses. They want versions of what their mothers had—intact families, material comfort—but better. Isadora recounts an argument she once had with her mom, Jude, who dressed in attention-grabbing getups and compulsively redecorated their Upper West Side apartment. The teenage Isadora pined for a less eccentric female role model. But as an adult, Isadora realizes that Jude’s flair for unusual fashion wasn’t really the issue. “When I think of all the energy, all the misplaced artistic aggression which my mother channeled into her passion for odd clothes and new decorating schemes, I wish she had been a successful artist instead,” Isadora says. She goes on: “There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.”
This sense—that previous generations of women had been victims of “misplaced artistic aggression,” victimizing their daughters in turn—was foundational to the feminist movement.
Gloria Steinem wrote about it in her famous essay “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It).” Ruth was Steinem’s mother, once a headstrong and ambitious young journalist who, through most of Gloria’s childhood, was painfully agoraphobic and addicted to tranquilizers. Gloria took care of Ruth, and it was only as an adult that she began to wonder about her mom’s sad transformation. “She had been a spirited, adventurous young woman who struggled out of a working-class family and into college, who found work she loved and continued to do, even after she was married and my older sister was there to be cared for,” Steinem writes.
Ruth quit her newspaper job after a nervous breakdown, which Steinem attributes to the simultaneous pressures of working, parenting, supporting her husband’s dream of opening a lakeside resort, and doing housework. Immediately, the scope of Ruth’s life shriveled. “The family must have watched this energetic, fun-loving, book-loving woman turn into someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book,” Steinem writes.
Steinem says her mother succumbed not only to the tragedy of her stifled creativity, but to the cultural forces that kept her from doing anything to regain it. Divorce and poverty, both of which Ruth had lived through, held her back and shoved her down with shame. Ruth had no strong female role models to pull her back up. She had admired her mother-in-law, Gloria’s grandmother, who had been a suffragist, but at home she still deferred to the men in the family, treating her husband and her boys like the entitled kings of the castle. Circumstances doomed Ruth, and everyone, not just Gloria, lost out. “The world still missed a unique person named Ruth,” Steinem concludes. “Though she longed to live in New York and Europe, she became a woman who was afraid to take a bus across town.”
Activists hoped that experiences like Ruth’s would subside with the work of feminism. In her essay, Steinem suggests that asking the question at all—what really happened to Ruth?—is an important start. But such questioning also grooved lines between mothers and daughters. Judy’s mother, Essie, for instance, wasn’t thrilled at the way moms came off in many of Blume’s novels.
“My mother used to say, ‘I’m very proud of you, but please leave mothers out of your books, everyone thinks it’s me,’ ” Blume said at the Arlington Public Library event.
Judy patiently told her that wasn’t possible. “I tried to explain that there would always be mothers in my stories and that none of them were based on her,” she wrote in a 2004 introduction to Wifey. That didn’t help, either. “She said it didn’t matter, that everyone would think she was Sandy Pressman’s mother anyway.”
But when it came to the sexual content of the novel, Blume said that her mother was less concerned. Essie typed out many of Judy’s manuscripts over the years and never said zip about the graphic scenes. She had learned a line from her former high school classmate, who happened to be Philip Roth’s mom, Bess. They ran into each other on the street one day and Bess Roth offered Essie the wisdom she’d acquired from being a parent to the author of Portnoy’s Complaint: the Oedipal, psychosexual 1969 literary sensation.
“When they ask how she knows all those things,” Bess supposedly told her old friend, “you say, ‘I don’t know, but not from me!’ ”
Chapter Sixteen Divorce
“I don’t think we could have survived two more years together.”
Even before it was published in the fall of 1978, Wifey caused drama. The racy novel wasn’t the right fit for Bradbury, which only handled books for children, so it was coming out with the Putnam imprint, under the eye of legendary editor in chief Phyllis Grann. Meanwhile, publicists at Blume’s paperback publisher, Dell, worried that Blume’s first book for adults would scare off her legions of loyal young readers. The trick was to herald Wifey properly but also make it very clear that this specific work was not intended for Blume’s typical audience.
Judy wasn’t concerned about professional fallout. She was confident that kids would have the good sense to avoid Wifey, or at least put it down as soon as they scanned a page or two and realized the book wasn’t written for them. She brushed off any suggestions that she should publish it under a pseudonym. However, she was a little bit anxious about the impact the novel might have on her personal life. Since the story concerned a troubled marriage, she showed the manuscript to John before it came out, inviting his feedback. She assured him, “If there’s anything that really bothers you, I’ll change it,” as she told Bust in 1997.
He handled it “brilliantly,” Blume said. “He didn’t say anything. He stayed out of it. I think that was really very smart.”
As Wifey’s publication date approached, the reviews started rolling in. Immediately, it was clear that the novel hit a nerve with the critics. Library Journal augured success, with a caveat: “Adult readers will enjoy this light romance as much as their kids love Blume’s best-selling juvenile novels, though they may not remember it a week later.”
The reviewer from the LA Times praised Blume’s abilities—“Blume has the enviable gift of good timing… she shares the same sense of proportion whether she’s dealing with pathos, slapstick, romance or reverie”—then veered to the philosophical in her assessment of Wifey’s moneyed cast of characters. “Blume forces us to ask if we can only examine our ‘inner needs’ when we have material well-being and leisure,” the reviewer wrote. “Or do those two factors magnify, or alleviate, our discontent?”
The New York Times was flattering, including Wifey in an article covering the “widespread trend” of feminist novels. The paper called Blume’s take “a bawdy account of a suburban wife’s rebellion against her unsatisfying marriage,” and put it on a continuum with previous groundbreaking books, including Fear of Flying and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, which didn’t come out in the US until 1971, nearly a decade after Plath’s death. But another critic, this one at the Washington Post, saw Wifey as derivative rather than innovative. Reviewer Sue Isaacs suggested, in a culturally prescient takedown, that the novel in question might as well have been penned by artificial intelligence. “Just for fun, imagine a computer which became bored with chess and war games. After a heart-to-heart with its programmer, it arranged to be fed every novel ever written about a stifled wife since the 1960s. Its lights blinked as it was fed Diary of a Mad Housewife and Fear of Flying… Then, it whirred for a microsecond or two, composing its own work which included all the ingredients of the genre.”
