Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories

The stories in Today a Woman Went Mad are about women in transitional spaces. In “Photographs” and “Mother,” a woman slides from pregnancy into motherhood. In “Sundays,” a woman sees that her view of happiness no longer aligns with her husband’s. In “Nights,” a bout of insomnia leads the narrator across and through her darkest preoccupations. The stories show women questioning their marriages, questioning their desires, questioning themselves.

The title story in this collection showcases a woman witnessing another woman teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown: incoherent and anxious in a grocery store, small children in tow, she’s whisked away by her brusque, sharp-tongued husband as the narrator and others look on. This casual misogyny links many of Wolizer’s stories, most published in the 1960s and 1970s, and though the women in these stories struggle in ways that are utterly familiar, the context in which their dreaming and suffering play out seems particularly brutal when approached through a present-day lens. Wolizer has been writing incisively about women’s relationships for decades, and this collection leads readers to wonder, uncomfortably: how much has changed?