Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown
A Book Review
I’m careening down the bumpiest railroad track in the country at the moment, somewhere between Tuscaloosa, Alabama and my destination of New Orleans, but I had to write this review immediately.
I picked up Recipe for a Perfect Wife on a whim in February when I was knee-deep in writing a paper for an academic conference titled “Ozzie, Harriet, June, and Ward: The Impact of 1950s Media on 21st Century Politics.” It came up as a suggested book on my Amazon account due to the number of books I was browsing on 1950s lifestyles and media.
Yes, it is now August. I’ve been busy. But it’s a 15 hour train trip from Atlanta to New Orleans, so I finally had some uninterrupted reading time.
There are several things to say about this book.
One is that I dearly love all the recipes sprinkled through the book. I want to make about 80% of them (the weird 1950s dip with the deviled ham and whipped cream I will probably pass on though, but I’m definitely making the lavender lemon muffins when I get home), though I would recommend leaving out Nellie’s extra special ingredient to her family seasoning mix. Trust me.
I also have a love/hate relationship with the helpful tips scattered through the book from titles like What a Young Wife Ought to Know (which shares helpful tidbits like “from the wedding day, the young matron should shape her life to the probable and desired contingency of conception and maternity. Otherwise she has no right or title to wifehood.) Love them because they give me a whole knew set of books and articles to reference in future academic papers. Hate them because…well that should be obvious.
What I particularly love about the book is how it weaves two very different time periods into one narrative. The first being the life of a young wife, Nellie Murdoch, in 1956. The second being the life of Alice Hale, recently fired from her job at a public relations firm, who has moved to the suburbs at the behest of her husband who is hoping she’ll become a good housewife like his mother and be ‘barefoot and pregnant’ soon (her husband’s actual words). Both women are living in the same house, 60 years apart. Both trapped in relationships and lives that don’t make them happy.
What forms is a narrative that brutally critiques the social expectations of married women and the accepted toxic behaviors of men, which Brown is heavily implying have not changed much in six decades.
“It wasn’t easy to be married and childless in those days. The social expectations around family were rigid.”
“I can only imagine,” Alice said. “They’re still fairly rigid now, if you ask me.”
I won’t give too much away, but through the story both Nellie and Alice begin to take their power back and find their own paths to happiness.
The only critique I have to offer here is that Alice’s story seems unfinished (or at least I find her situation at the end of the book unsatisfying compared to Nellie’s). Or perhaps I’m finding more joy in Nellie’s victory than Nellie herself felt.
Either way, it’s a compelling dissection of women’s power and agency and discovery of self. I recommend reading it. As one of the author quotes on the cover states, the book is “timely” in a world where Republicans are pushing to throw American women back in time to the life that Nellie had to live.
