The most recommended homemaker books

This dual timeline novel is based on the transformative relationship between the 13th-century love poet, Rumi, his contemporary wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and a twenty-first-century homemaker who alters her life based on their teachings and the intensity of their bond.

The author weaves these characters into a narrative that celebrates love in all its forms as the most powerful force of nature. This book features fictionalized characterisation of real personages, as well as presenting a variety of other characters representing humanity in all its greatness and ugliness. Philosophical and thought-provoking, this book deepened my life.   

Erma was a genius at tapping family emotions while making you laugh. A timeless treasure. I keep Forever, Erma near me so I can pick it up and read a few of her essays. She always makes me smile. She nails family life with humor and grace. She makes me laugh and cry. Though written many years ago, her stories are still timely.

This was my first Grady Hendrix, and my first "vampire book" since Anne Rice’s. It’s the story of what a genteel housewife in a proper suburb does when a man she considers dangerous moves to town.

Forget convincing her husband if she can’t even convince her best buds: the women with wildly varied personalities and wildly varied backgrounds in her book club. This book is by turns poignant, heartbreaking, terrifying, and laugh-out-loud hilarious. 

This is a book you will love or hate. I loved it and found it frighteningly relatable despite being originally published in Italy in the 1950s.

Forbidden Notebook, newly translated into English, is an intimate, almost claustrophobic, account of how our protagonist, Valeria, begins writing her thoughts and feelings in a notebook, which she keeps hidden. Only in the act of hiding it does she realize that she has nowhere of her own in the shared family apartment, and only by writing does she gain a sense of her own self after years devoted to her family.

To quote the poet Muriel Rukeyser, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." And for Valeria, it does.

And speaking of whacky, we come now to this 40-year-old story of a lonely suburban housewife, Dorothy, who undertakes a romance with a sea monster named Larry, an escapee from a research institute who shows up in her kitchen one day. That sounds like the plot of a weird B-movie, but in fact the novella is a work of feminist literature while also being a heartbreaking story of two characters who find themselves unable to escape their pasts but manage to achieve a species of healing. The writing is straightforward but conceals a great deal, an important lesson for me when I first read this.

I first came across this book when babysitting at a neighbor’s house as a young teen. I was a giant Judy Blume fangirl and I was confused. I thought I’d read all of her novels. When I picked this one up, I managed to find a “dirty part” quite quickly while flipping through it and I stole the book to show that passage to all my friends. Scandalous! When I was out of college, I actually read the whole book and found it a poignant, but still funny, look at dreams deferred, marriage, motherhood, and sex.

I love how, as with my novel, the writer weaves together the stories of two women who lived in entirely different eras. I also appreciate how she brought real-world people and events, like JFK and the 1906 earthquake, into her fictional world. But what I found most evocative about The Obituary Writer were the author’s portrayal of the institution of marriage and how her “older” protagonist—the one dating further back in history—dedicated her life to helping others deal with grief and loss. This altruistic passion was similar to one that my historical protagonist discovered on her journey of personal growth.

It is hardly news that housework is gendered. But in this classic study Cowan, by taking housewifery seriously as work and kitchen utensils and appliances seriously as technologies, opens up the whole panorama of production and consumption in a domestic setting. The influx of new appliances, and in a more convenient form old materials (such as powdered soap) in the early decades of the 20th century worked to, in a sense, “industrialize” the home. Unlike factory workers, however, housewives were unpaid, isolated, and unspecialized. Their managerial role shrank (hired help disappeared from most homes)  and rather than being drained of meaning, like the work of factory hands, theirs became burdened with portentous implications of love, devotion, and creativity. Finally, as housework became “easy,” standards rose. At one time changing the bed might have amounted to putting the bottom sheet in the wash and the top sheet on the bottom,… show more.

Women – and housewives – have long done most of a household’s shopping, making them the arbiters of family consumer habits. But as Twarog details in this fascinating book, many working-class American women have used their status as housewives to engage in protest and build power. Politics of the Pantry focuses particularly on battles over the cost of food – especially meat – in the 20th century. Women-led meat boycotts occurred in 1935, 1966, 1969, and 1973, for example. This slim volume is readable, engaging, and highlights the important role that women have played in consumer politics.

While I enjoyed this book while I was reading it, it was only after I’d digested it (pun intended) that I really came to appreciate its value. I think one of the real measures of an artwork is how much it sits with you in the months and years after the initial read/watch/listen, and this is one I think about often. The story follows a documentarian attempting to serve the corporate hierarchy and produce an asinine show about American wives and the meat-filled dinners they serve their husbands, but the novel gradually unfolds as a complex critique of misogyny, corporate control, Japanese and American culture, and the brutal nature of the modern livestock industry. 

Recipe for a Perfect Wife is elegant and intriguing and hits on many of the character and thematic notes that I look for. The relationship between the main character, Alice, and the house that she moves to and comes to resent is palpable and relatable.

I was all in from the moment Alice finds a mysterious cookbook in the house, waiting for her next move and for Brown to reveal more about Alice and what makes her tick.

The best compliment I can pay to any novel is that I was sad when it ended. I don’t know how to explain that feeling, but I know it when I feel it.