Caitlin Flanagan - To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife

Copyright 2006 by Caitlin Flanagan

Reading group guide copyright 2007 by Caitlin Flanagan and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: May 2011

Portions of this book previously appeared, in different form, in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. Goodnight Moon 1947 by Harper & Row. Text renewed 1975 by Roberta Brown Rauch. Illustrations renewed by Edith Hurd, Clement Hurd, John Thacher Hurd, and George Hellyer, as trustees of the Edith & Clement Hurd 1982 Trust. Reprinted with permission from HarperCollins Publishers. Jennie Rothenbergs interview with Caitlin Flanagan, which is reprinted in the reading group guide at the back of this book, originally appeared at The Atlantic Online on May 12, 2006. Copyright 2006 The Atlantic Monthly Group. Reprinted with permission.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-316-18653-7

Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife

Caitlin Flanagan writes with intelligence, wit, and brio. Shes likable. What makes Flanagans book original and vital is that she is a realist, willing to acknowledge the essential gray areas in too often polarized positions.

Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review

Readers not familiar with Flanagans stylishly written essays on family life for the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker are in for a treat. Her observations on the things that have always interested me the most: women and children, households and marriages, are witty, fresh, and unfailingly honest about the choices and challenges facing young women.

Kate OBeirne, National Review

Flanagan is a very talented writer, with a quick wit and a gift for turning the kinds of phrases that warrant immediate rereading. Shes bright and very funny, in a dry, self-deprecating, and tongue-in-cheek way that her critics often fail to get or, perhaps, choose to miss.

M. A. Turner, Journal News

This reality explains my unbidden attraction to Caitlin Flanagan. Self-deprecation (along with hilarious writing about sex) is one of her sharply honed tools.

Emily Bazelon, Washington Post Book World

Ms. Flanagan can be a lovely, lyrical writerthe kind whose phrases enter your head and linger there, like the aroma ofoh, why not?baking cookies.

Alexandra Jacobs, New York Observer

What makes Flanagan entertaining (and irritating) are her often outrageous statements. What makes her worth reading is the complexity of the issues she addresses.

Rachel Kramer Bussel, Bust

The book is tartly witty, a festive knuckle-rapper and deflater of hot-air balloons. It is also a poignant memoir of Flanagans mother and an elegy for her own halcyon childhood. Passages of the book are moving and beautifully written, and though I hope Flanagan never abandons her journalistic pen, I also hope she continues in this strain.

Katherine Powers, Boston Globe

Flanagan has taken a literary conceptand a literary talentand let it loose in a polemical marketplace of ideas. And as the critics line up to have a go at her book, that may be the challenge Flanagan faces. Shes not only a media star but an author now, with a book tour ahead and a persona thats between hard covers, certain to ratchet up the scrutiny yet again.

Gene Piccalo, Los Angeles Times

This book looks deceptively like light reading but contains deep and insightful thoughts about families, children, and recognizing what is important in life.

Peggy Carlson, Free Lance-Star

Flanagan brings experience and intimacy to these essays. Flustered mothers and frustrated wives will find just what they need here: a little camaraderie.

Julie Hale, BookPage

Ms. Flanagan is a wonderful, funny writer.

Margaret Wente, Toronto Globe and Mail

To Hell with All That is social criticism with champagne bubbleswitty, poignant, sparkling with novelistic insight, and fiercely entertaining.

Margaret Talbot

For Rob, as always;

For Patrick and Conor;

And for Ellen

A new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life and happiness have lasted to the present time.

L EO T OLSTOY , Family Happiness

: Some dates, names, and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

F EW THINGS IN LIFE are as terrible as closing up the house of ones parents after they have died. There is the simultaneous urge to save everything and to jettison it all. Freud famously observed that the mourner is not to be rushed, that she must be allowed to accomplish her work piecemeal. A mourner may relinquish her emotional attachment to the loved ones favorite chair one day, but to his winter coat not for several months or even years. But when my sister and I let ourselves into our parents house a year after my mother diedand just three weeks after my father lay down on a guestroom bed and quietly followed suitwe were not in the business of beginning a years-long breakup with our parents possessions, charged though they were with associations and even signs of recent use (the book facedown on the bedside table, the sheet of paper rolled into the typewriter).

We lived in distant cities; we were wives and householders with children in school and husbands who relied on us. We arrived armed with the totems of coolheaded efficiency: colored stickers (red for the things that would be shipped to her house in Santa Barbara, yellow for mine in Los Angeles, blue for Goodwill), pads of lined paper (for composing our separate lists), and Hefty bags for the trash. We had three days to do the job, a hotel room in town (sleeping in the house seemed unimaginable), and the jittery, false cheer of two people who have come through a long, difficult stretch togethermy mothers death had been one kind of horror, my fathers anotherand who are determined to put a miserable episode behind them with dispatch.

In an hour we were undone by the task. While cleaning out my mothers desk, my sister accidentally threw away my eleventh-grade report card, a mistake that threw us instantly back upon our child selvesme sobbing over a minor disappointment, her calmly solving the problem, emptying Hefty bags of paperwork onto the laundry-room floor and sifting through their contents until she produced, unharmed, the sainted report card. It was only after I had hand-carried the thing home and taken an unsentimental look at it that I realized it was not one for posterity. The A in Honors English might be nice to show my children one day, but there was no way to produce that A without also revealing the C+ in Biology and the B in French III. The only remarkable thing about the report card, it turned out, was the fact that my mother had saved it. The slip of paper was not a testament of past academic glory, only of a hard new fact: there was no longer anyone in the world who loved me enough to save my report cards and school pictures and Christmas poems. I wasnt anyones daughter anymore.