Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril. Based on the intimate diaries Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm: a parent's interior life prior to his own existence.
An extraordinary portrait of the female soul under the conditions of 20th-century misogyny ... Consistently luxurious ... Elaine is the very model of an unlikable narrator; she’s degraded and her company often feels degrading. But she’s also witty and exhilaratingly blunt, and her darkest opinions are often right on the money.
To inhabit the libidinal consciousness of one’s own mother is an inherently awkward undertaking ... It is a compassionate if somewhat flip portrait, and by the time we reach its sad denouement the reader has only sympathy—and not just for poor Elaine. Lurking in the text as young Billy, who gazes out at us like some reproachful Freudian ghost, Will Self has written his own origin story.
A sensitive study ... The housewife in question is based on Mr. Self’s mother—a fragmentary photograph of her appears on the cover—and the elements of the story have been gleaned from diaries he found after her death. If this extraordinary invasion of privacy doesn’t put readers off, they’ll find a vivid depiction of a mind in turmoil ... The uniform desperation of Elaine’s emotions becomes quickly suffocating. Mr. Self has extracted from his mother’s diaries a person entirely defined by her longings and neuroses, less a character than a stereotypical postwar case study.
