Hilma Wolitzer, TODAY A WOMAN WENT MAD IN THE SUPERMARKET: Stories

[0:01]Hi, I'm Sivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast,

[0:05]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

[0:07]If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology called Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids.

[0:12]Check it out, and you'll hear from 49 authors about all sorts of things

[0:16]Moms Don't Have Time to Do. All the authors have been on this podcast.

[0:19]Also, check out my TikTok at with Sivi and Tracy.

[0:22]My other podcast, Sex Talk with Sivi and Tracy.

[0:25]Check out Moms Don't Have Time to Write on Medium.

[0:28]And of course, my new publishing company called Sivi Books.

[0:32]And now, back to our daily author interview site and a quick hello from some of my kids.

[0:36]Hi! Hi! Hello!

[0:38]Enjoy the show.

[0:40]Helma Woolitzer is the author of Today, A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.

[0:45]Helma is the author of nine novels, four books for children, and a writing guide.

[0:49]She has received many awards, including Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships,

[0:53]and has led fiction workshops at several universities and at the Breadloaf Writers Conference.

[0:58]Her first novel was published when she was in her mid-40s.

[1:00]She's 91 years old and lives in New York City.

[1:03]Welcome, Helma.

[1:04]Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss.

[1:07]Today, A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket Stories.

[1:11]Thank you so much for having me here.

[1:14]You're so welcome.

[1:15]This is an amazing collection of stories spanning all of a woman's life,

[1:22]in her relationship.

[1:24]Some stories all interweave, others don't.

[1:26]It's so amazing to watch through the years.

[1:30]Your first story came out in this book, in what, 1966?

[1:34]Yes.

[1:34]You fixed all the way through the coronavirus pandemic.

[1:38]What a ride.

[1:39]And just that there were so many,

[1:41]like some of the ones you wrote so early on,

[1:43]could have been written yesterday.

[1:44]It's amazing.

[1:45]That really gratifies me.

[1:47]I looked back at them after I had to put them together and

[1:51]as to the collection.

[1:52]And I realized there were no cell phones.

[1:54]There were no computers.

[1:56]And yet the women's inner lives were very similar to the way they are now.

[2:01]Yeah.

[2:02]They felt a certain restlessness in their domesticity.

[2:06]They enjoyed it.

[2:07]As I did, I love being a wife and mother.

[2:10]But at the same time, I wanted something else and I didn't know what it was.

[2:15]And then I discovered writing.

[2:17]Oh, it's so nice.

[2:19]I think that that restlessness and that feeling plagues a lot of people, right?

[2:25]People who are, whether you're at home or your career has been shifted by kids or

[2:31]having kids automatically just shifts something major in your life.

[2:35]And I mean, that sounded so silly to say.

[2:38]But the way you capture it is so just on the nose.

[2:43]I was hoping I could just read this one passage.

[2:45]If that's okay from nights, you said that you wrote,

[2:49]what men learn is that there are some women in this world who are never satisfied,

[2:53]who move through their homes with the restlessness of day workers.

[2:56]Even their blood seems restless, rising and falling so that they are

[3:00]alternately pale or flushed and suffer from dizzy spells and capricious moods.

[3:04]I am one of these women.

[3:06]Indeed, I was.

[3:09]You still are.

[3:10]So I am.

[3:12]And I looked like 20 times at the front to make sure that it said stories and not essays.

[3:17]I'm like, is this about her life or it's not about her life?

[3:20]It's how it actually her husband or not her husband or just a character that you've been

[3:25]following for decades.

[3:27]Well, I do feel very protective of my own privacy and my family's privacy.

[3:33]And also, I think it's more fun to invent people,

[3:37]but I have to use some experiences for my own life.

[3:40]So I call it truth wrapped in a lie.

[3:45]I've been most autobiographical story in the collection is the final story,

[3:49]the great escape, the only really brand new story.

[3:53]And I felt after my husband and I contracted COVID-19 and he died of it.

[3:59]And after I came home, we were in separate hospitals.

[4:02]It was a very traumatic experience.

[4:06]But after I came home, he wasn't there.

[4:09]I hadn't seen him.

[4:11]I hadn't really experienced his death in a way.

[4:16]We were separated before it happened.

[4:18]And when I came home, I was grieving.

[4:22]But it also didn't seem real.

[4:24]It seemed so real in a way.

[4:26]And writing about it several months later, I must say, it made it real.

[4:31]And it also was a form of grieving.

[4:34]And it gave me an opportunity to deal with it and accept it and go on.

[4:41]And it made a really big difference.

[4:42]It was painful to write, but it was also cathartic.

[4:46]I'm so sorry for your last.

[4:47]I'm so sorry.

[4:49]Thank you.

[4:51]But on the other hand, we were married for 68 years.

[4:54]And we were both past the age of 90.

[4:57]And that is a great gift that not many people get.

[5:01]True, very true.

[5:02]But still, yesterday, the weekend was my grandmother's,

[5:07]would have been my grandmother's 98th birthday.

[5:09]She passed away when she was 97.

[5:11]But just because she lived that long, doesn't mean I miss her any less.

[5:14]Right, it's still from one moment to the next.

[5:16]I know you expected logically that someone you love

[5:19]is getting older and you should be prepared.

[5:22]But whether it's my dog or my grandmother or whatever,

[5:25]like even it doesn't make it any better just because you know.

[5:29]No, you've known her longer, which makes it in a way harder in some ways.

[5:34]You know, my husband and I were so youth to each other and so

[5:38]compatible.

[5:40]I didn't think I was going to write any more fiction at that point.

[5:43]We had a really nice old age.

[5:46]I have to say we had some illnesses and stuff that we could deal with.

[5:52]But coronavirus just blindsided us was just so shocking.

[5:57]And the day he went off to the hospital, I had to call 911

[6:02]because he suddenly couldn't stand up and was running a very high fever.

[6:06]And as I say in the story, the EMTs kept yelling at me

[6:11]to get his phone, get his charger, get his pajamas.

[6:14]And I was racing around doing everything.

[6:17]And then running after the gurney down,

[6:20]hauled to the elevator, we live in a high rise in Manhattan.

[6:22]And I never said goodbye to him.

[6:25]I never said I love you.

[6:26]I never said anything.

[6:27]We did talk to each other on the phone because a few days later,

[6:30]I came down with it and was in a different hospital.

[6:34]And we did talk every night on the phone till almost the end.

[6:38]The final night I was told and this really broke my heart was that

[6:43]he was told on Friday night that I was coming home on Monday.

[6:48]And he died a few hours after he was told that.

[6:51]And he couldn't speak anymore, but he clapped.

[6:54]Deep-hearted.

[6:55]And that was too much for me to even put into the story.

[6:59]I had, so I changed details and I also assigned the events of the story

[7:05]to those fictional characters who are not us.

[7:08]They were not my husband and me, but they lived parallel lives.

[7:12]And they were sort of like friends who had moved away.

[7:16]And I always wondered what happened to them.

[7:18]And by writing about them was the way I found out.

[7:21]And I'm still going to write about her again now.

[7:25]I think.

[7:26]I hope.

[7:27]I hope you do too.

[7:28]That was so moving.

[7:29]I'm so sorry you went through that.

[7:30]I just, that's seen in your story too.

[7:33]And she chases after him and yells down sort of the elevator or whatever.

[7:36]I love you and oh my gosh, so many people who didn't get to say

[7:40]the proper goodbyes.

[7:41]It's just terrible.

[7:43]No, but you know, I felt isolated, but I didn't feel alone

[7:48]because the whole world was going through this.

[7:51]I felt as if I were part of something very large.

[7:54]And so, you know, each person's loss is tragic to them.

[8:00]The whole world was going through a kind of mass tragedy with this terrible virus.

[8:06]I'm not sure that made it any better though.

[8:07]I mean, my husband's mother passed away from COVID.

[8:10]She was in the hospital for six weeks.

[8:11]And her mother passed away before her, which is how she got it.

[8:14]And so she was 87.

[8:16]And they lived together.

[8:17]And then she had it.

[8:18]And then she went to the hospital.

[8:20]And my mother-in-law got it.

[8:21]And it was this whole thing.

[8:23]And they've had her put on hazmat suit in the hospital to say goodbye.

[8:27]And she had to stuff it with all this ice cubes

[8:30]because she already had a fever herself.

[8:32]And anyway, I'm so sorry.

[8:34]That's just so awful.

[8:36]And then the aftermath of it was that

[8:39]you couldn't have any of the rituals that you have.

[8:42]There was no funeral and we didn't get together afterwards.

[8:45]I didn't see my children.

[8:47]They didn't see me.

[8:48]And not only that, all of my husband's things were still in the apartment.

[8:52]His clothing, his shoes were next to the bed.

[8:54]His toothbrush was in the holder.

[8:56]I mean, it was really that made it less real in a way.

[9:00]And finally, more than a year later, when my grandson's were finally vaccinated,

[9:06]they came over and helped me both emotionally and physically

[9:10]because my husband never threw out a belt or a pair of socks, obviously.

[9:14]And his closet was jammed with stuff.

[9:16]And the boys came over to the men.

[9:18]I should say, my young men, grandsons,

[9:21]and they stuffed everything into trash bags and took it to a charitable organization.

[9:26]And it felt good to have them there begin with.

[9:30]And my husband was a psychologist, but he moonlighted

[9:34]as a jazz musician sometimes.

[9:36]And his youth, he played sacks and clarinet.

[9:39]He played bar mitzvahs and weddings and stuff like that.

[9:42]And I had his sacks in this big box under, in this big case,

[9:47]under my computer desk.

[9:49]And I rest my feet on it.

[9:50]But I was really happy to give it to my younger grandson, who's a musician.

[9:55]And my husband would have wanted him to have it.

[9:57]So that actually felt...

[10:00]Good. Oh, but that's not a whole book is about. No, no, no, I'm sorry. And I know, I know, or even that story. That story is really about a long marriage, and it has some funny aspects of what marriage is like as well, because to me, there's always humor at the edge of the darkness.

[10:19]It's a beautiful way to say that. You must be a writer.

[10:23]No, and I didn't mean to suggest I know we started talking about this, but no, the stories cover so many different things. And the funniest part, I think in the whole collection is when you're talking about Howard's first wife, and they were trying to figure out like the alimony settings.

[10:41]Allimony and all that. And you said it would be cheaper if you just adopted her. I had so much fun writing that story. Oh, my gosh, that cracked me up. I was Elizabeth Strout's favorite story in the collection. She said, she wrote that wonderful forward to the collection. She did. That was also, that was also amazing. So that story was called over about how Howard's first wife would have let him go.

[11:06]And you said her hold on him wasn't even sexual. I could have dealt with that. It would have been an all out war. And of course I wouldn't want. There was something final about me and studying. I wondered why he was tracked her in the first place.

[11:17]Yeah, and then she said, yeah, we gave Renee plenty of money, although she denied all legal rights to alimony.

[11:23]They were only married seven months and she decided she didn't deserve alimony after such a short relationship that you can't even collect unemployment insurance.

[11:30]And let's you've been on the job for a while. But we were always giving her money. Anyway, 10 here, five there, ostensibly, they were loans, but Renee was hard pressed to repay them.

[11:39]I suggested to Howard that we adopt her that it would be cheaper tax wise and all. And Howard seemed to really consider the idea getting that contemplative look in his eye chewing his dinner in a slow even rhythm.

[11:50]And Renee living with us, another bed in the converted converted dinette with the children's sleep.

[11:57]That was fun to think of that.

[12:00]Don't wear a cane from actually. Oh my gosh, too funny. So these characters that have sort of gone. Oh, and I also love this in trophies.

[12:08]When you said Howard when you wrote Howard's father died, moving Howard up one generation and canceling forever his coming attractions of life.

[12:17]That's a nice way to say that, right? Because when you lose somebody, you're also losing all those things that you had sort of planned on happening. So I love how it's sort of deleting the coming attractions, if you will, as a concept.

[12:30]What is it like to follow a character for so long, because I get very invested in characters from fiction as well. Like I feel like they're real people.

[12:40]I love them to meet, like, characters from different books. I'm sure would be friends. I wanted to have like a universe where that happens.

[12:47]That's a really good idea for a book, by the way. I know that's what I really want to do. I actually asked two authors who I was just like your characters have to meet because I'm, I always am connecting people in real life.

[12:58]I was like, your two characters have to meet. Why don't you guys get together and write a story where those two characters, you know, interact because.

[13:06]But anyway, they, one of them was too busy and maybe I'll come back to it. But then I'm wondering, should it be the original authors who write who have to co write this book or could there be a book with lots of characters.

[13:17]John from all the different books. I don't know.

[13:20]It's a perfect idea for a novel and actually ill doctor wrote when he wrote ragtime. He had real people meet in the book, like JP Morgan and Houdini and people like that and his editor asked him if they had actually ever met and he said now they have.

[13:41]So that's the power of fiction, I think.

[13:46]I mean, who's to say, I mean, the center of this, once you create these characters like aren't don't they have some sort of space in the world in some way, shape, reform, they become so real.

[13:58]I mean, I know they're not ghosts or I don't know what to call them, but I don't know. There's just something with staying power and then your characters, right.

[14:06]And howards are bopping around through his life. And as you, you live, he follows your path. Right. Where does Howard go? I don't know.

[14:15]It's a mystery. It's a mystery wonderful mystery. And they do seem real to me while I'm writing them. And after I'm finished with a book with a novel or even a short story, I feel bereft.

[14:28]And I always said that writing is a solitary occupation, but it's not a lonely one because you have all these characters living inside your head so long they should be paying rent.

[14:44]Maybe rent controlled rates or something.

[14:48]I actually interviewed your daughter Meg like maybe three years ago, I feel like two years ago, three years ago. What is it like having writing so running in the family at this point? Do you, what is that relationship? How is that affected your relationship?

[15:02]It's even made it better. It's terrific to begin with because she's so much fun and and we're really friends as well as mother and daughter. And but we have this other thing in common language stories.

[15:16]We share, we share work with one another. We share first drafts and make started writing very early. I was a late bloomer and she was a very early bloomer.

[15:27]And when she was a child, she was writing these terrific little stories. And she would show them to me and I would say they were terrific, which they were.

[15:37]And after a while she became angry and she said, you just love everything I do.

[15:45]I realized that she wanted to be treated with more respect. She wanted to be a peer. So I was more critical. And then of course she burst into tears.

[15:57]So I had to find some happy medium, some balance between honesty and charity, which actually worked and carried over into workshops when I was teaching.

[16:09]because you had to be honest with the student whose work was up for criticism, otherwise you weren't constructive.

[16:17]But you also had to be aware of the person behind the story of somebody sitting there with a fast beating heart, hoping you won't say something disastrous, which is what happened to me actually a bad, a bad experience.

[16:31]When I met 30s, when I began to write short stories, I took a wet writing workshop with Anatol Buryard at the new school was a beginner's workshop.

[16:43]And we all had to submit stories and the very first night, the classroom was packed. It must have been 50 people there.

[16:50]He called on me first to come to the front of the room and read my story aloud.

[16:56]First of all, I had stage fright and I felt very embarrassed.

[17:02]And he also told me to spit out my gum, which is even more humiliating.

[17:07]And I got to the front of the room. I read the story very quickly without any affect and collapse into a chair.

[17:14]And Anatol asked if anybody would like to comment on it.

[17:18]And a man raised his hand and said that was the most boring thing I ever heard.

[17:23]Well, I wanted to cry as much as naked as a child, but Anatol passed me a note, which said the story is fine. See me later.

[17:32]And then he said to my critic, you have every right to just like the story and to find it boring, but you're obligated to tell the writer why you think it's boring and how she might make it better.

[17:46]And in that moment, I understood about revision and also about teaching.

[17:52]And after class, I spoke to him and he moved me into an advanced class where I read the same story aloud again, and they didn't like it either.

[18:02]They said constructive, they gave me constructive criticism, which was much easier to take. And I felt I was launched a survivor then.

[18:12]Wow, what a great story and see whatever happened to that guy. Yeah, right. I mean, the critic like whatever happened to the critic.

[18:19]Oh, everybody asked that I have no idea. I don't remember his name. I do remember his face. He looked quite smug. Yeah.

[18:28]Probably nothing good happened to that guy. You know, there's karma in the world after all.

[18:34]Wow. What types of books do you read? Do you love to read? I'm assuming you I shouldn't assume, but do you love to read and if so, what do you like to read?

[18:44]I like to read fiction, of course, and I like to read essays and I love to read biographies. I'm interested in people's real lives and they're imagined lives.

[18:52]Right now I have a William on my website table.

[18:57]And I've also had to be doing some reading for essays that I was assigned to write for I did one for the Wall Street Journal and I'm doing one. I just did one for the Guardian in London in Manchester rather.

[19:11]And I had to choose books to talk about. And so I was rereading those books, Stanley Elkin's wonderful, the living and one of my favorite writers of British writer, Jane Gordon, her book God on the rocks, which is a terrific book.

[19:27]And I'm rereading sleepless nights by Elizabeth Hardwick.

[19:32]My shelves are bulging and I just have to reach my hand out and I have company for the night.

[19:39]Part of why I even started this whole podcast and all of this was after I got divorced. I had every other weekend of so quiet.

[19:46]Right. My kids weren't here. I have four kids of my own and it was just so sort of sad and quiet. And this therapist I went to said, you know,

[19:53]Elizabeth, you love to read so much. You know, with a good book, you'll never be lonely. And so that's like, that's it. I just like read.

[20:00]Oh, the time. I'm not lonely and remarried. Everything's fine, but yeah, and that's where the title of your whole program came from. Yes, pretty much.

[20:09]I would think that mom don't have time to write either. And when I began to write, I was doing it at the kitchen table. No one was really taking me seriously. First of all, I hadn't published anything yet.

[20:22]And my husband and I were two typewriter family. We had two standard typewriters. He was the one end of the kitchen table typing up. He, as I said, it was a psychologist. He was typing up his patients reports and I was at the other end typing my story. The kids were running around. The dog was barking and my children actually came home for lunch from school. They live. Their school was a block away. So I only had those couple of hours.

[20:50]in the morning to be totally alone and a couple of hours in the afternoon. And no one really took it seriously. My parents would call up and they would talk to me in stereo on two phones and my mother might say, you know, what are you doing today? And I would say, I'm writing a short story. And she would say, did the sheets arrive from Macy's.

[21:12]If I hadn't said it. But then when I sold the first story of the Saturday evening post for enough money to buy, put it down payment on my first car, and which really made a very big difference in terms of my independence because we lived in the suburbs and I had no car.

[21:33]So I had to walk my children everywhere and wait till my husband came home to go to the supermarket to get groceries and stuff. So this was a miracle and it was the Saturday evening post.

[21:46]And when I told my father, he said, wow, I read that at the dentist.

[21:54]It gave it such authority and it did make a difference. I felt, okay, now I'm really a writer and I'm going to write a story a week or a month and a friend of my husband said, well, you'll have a fleet of ramblers.

[22:11]What I bought. Unfortunately, I didn't publish a story for three years. And then it was to a very small prestigious litigation magazine, but I only got like a hundred bucks or something like that enough to put some gas in that.

[22:27]And I realized I wasn't in this for the money, which was just as well.

[22:34]Just out of curiosity. Where is your family from originally?

[22:38]You mean my parents? Yeah.

[22:40]My mother was born in the United States. My father was born in what was Russia, Bessarabia, Romania, Moldavia. I mean, it kept changing. The borders just kept changing.

[22:51]And it was not a literary household, but there was a real oral tradition. First of all, we were three generation household, my grandmother, an aunt lived with us, an uncle's were in the neighborhood.

[23:04]Everybody came over on Saturday. And I remember lying under the kitchen table and just listening among the shoes just listening to these great stories.

[23:14]And this was during the Great Depression and during World War II. And yet there was so much laughter. My family really had a collective great sense of humor.

[23:25]And that was so uplifting during that period.

[23:30]Because I remember my father was out of work, things were really tough and yet there was a feeling of optimism and joy, which I think eventually permeated my own stories.

[23:43]That's wonderful. That's so beautiful. I love that image of you underneath the table. Oh my gosh, that's just, I feel like it should be a little illustration or something somewhere.

[23:55]And they spoke in English, broken English, Yiddish and pig Latin.

[24:00]And I learned every language so that I could understand what they were talking about. If they didn't want me to know something, I desperately wanted to know it.

[24:09]And it's that curiosity that I think most writers have. What happens next. What are other people thinking.

[24:18]How are they are in a lives and I happen to believe that everyone has an interesting inner life.

[24:26]And a psychiatrist friend of mine said, no, they don't.

[24:33]And I've heard too many boring stories, but I still believe.

[24:39]And going to work when I was young and going to work on the subway. I remember sitting opposite a whole bunch of other people and making up stories about their lives.

[24:50]It was a way of getting through the boring subway ride too. But it was interesting. I just feel that you have to consider the other with sympathy and curiosity.

[25:02]I completely agree. I love that. All right. What advice would you give for to aspiring authors, aspiring writers.

[25:10]Keep doing it. No matter what. Even if your mother asks you if you got the sheets for Macy's, just keep writing, ignore that.

[25:19]And also, read your work aloud. If you read your own work aloud, not for an audience, but for yourself, you can hear the clunkers.

[25:29]You can hear if there's any musicality to it. And also read a lot of other people. It's like, it's like eating language.

[25:39]And you then have it within you to me reading improves my vocabulary.

[25:45]Suddenly, I'm just filled filled with language.

[25:49]And when my characters come to tell me their stories. And I feel they do.

[25:54]I don't get stories. I get characters. And then my characters tell me their stories. And it usually starts with a sentence.

[26:03]And so, I would tell writers to revise, to read, and just not to give up your writing first for yourself publication is very pleasing and also harrowing, which you have to deal with reviews and rejections rejections first and then reviews and then maybe bad sales.

[26:26]You know, people my agent one saying most writers on their pub day say, when is something going to happen and he hates all them never.

[26:37]I feel very lucky though. I've had a really good writing life.

[26:42]And I've had a good personal life as well. So I feel fortunate. This is a very strange time of life. I'm 91. I'll be 92 in January, if I make it.

[26:52]And I'm alone. And I'm independent. And I want to maintain that independence. But I'm worried about it.

[27:02]And this is the next story I want to write about this character, Paul. Let, who was widowed in that final story. And she might worry about the same thing.

[27:14]And I wonder how she would deal with that how her children would behave what they would do. And I feel I feel I'm going to write that story.

[27:22]I can't wait to read that story. I can't wait.

[27:25]I can't wait.

[27:46]Thank you.

[27:47]All right.

[27:48]Bye bye.

[27:49]Thank you.

[27:51]Thank you so much.