‘Midnights’ with ‘The Pumpkin Eater’
In which Juno is obsessed with Taylor Swift, and I can't shut up about Penelope Mortimer's book.
Good morning to all the sexy babies, whoever you are. It’s me. Hi.
The small joys of this past week have been overshadowed by the large joys of new music from The Great Pumpkin herself, T Swift, but last week, before Midnights came out, I read Penelope Mortimer’s heroic, sublime, DGAF (anti-hero of a?) novel The Pumpkin Eater. ’Tis the damn season, right? (Okay, okay, that’s the last one.) For the record, I am not really a pumpkin-spice person; I’ll take an even more basic caramel latte, “Taylor’s version” any day. I have never had the urge to throw pie into the blender. It seems like a waste of perfectly good pie. You could’ve had a cup of coffee a caramel latte, Taylor’s version with that pie. Is there even coffee in a PSL, or is it more like a chai latte, and do people still drink those? Are they not . . . sort of the same thing? My freshman year of college, when I was too traumatized by my high school’s cafeteria to eat in the dining hall, I lived off “chai tea”-flavored Luna Bars. IYKYK/RIP. Waiting for those to come back stronger than a 90s trend . . .
My Instagram For You recommendations page has been nothing but saturated gold and burgundy cozy spooky shimmer* falling leaves and one Gilmore girl or another in kooky appliqué knitted hats since July 1. Juno, my extra cute dog, has not picked a favorite new Midnights track yet, but she was transfixed by Miss Americana when it came out:
In any case, before it was Midnights season, it was pumpkin-everything season, and I was looking for something to read at my parents’ house. At the bottom of my backpack (that I haven’t fully unpacked since last visiting them for Labor Day), The Pumpkin Eater was waiting for me underneath an extra pair of socks and bathing suit bottoms (where is the top? :/ ). Possibly because the book had been marinating for two months in my backpack and weirdly smelled like me when I want to smell like I haven’t completely given up—eau de perma-pandemic consisting of hand sanitizer and this oil blend I buy in bulk—but it instantly felt like my kind of book.
It opens during a therapy session, in which the therapist suggests that the narrator—the wife of a screenwriter and mother of many children (six? eight?) called Mrs. Armitage, the only name revealed to us—would like to be something useful . . . like a tea-cosy. She has just had a breakdown in the linens section of Harrods over her husband’s infidelities and abuses, about which he feels extremely guilty about—oh, what’s that? He doesn’t? Not even a little bit? Even though her emotional state is basically all his fault not just for his many affairs, but for his alternately gaslighting and blaming her for his behavior? “Do you think you’re going to get over this period of your life, because I find it awfully depressing” is his response to her “little weeps.” Doesn’t seem like he feels that bad!
The book is often billed as for “angry” young women and “semi-autobiographical,” chronicling parts of her tempestuous marriage to the writer John Mortimer. (The actress Emily Mortimer’s father, FWIW. She is A+ as The Bolter in the recent adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.) It’s Penelope M’s most successful book, and Anne Bancroft even stars in a movie adaptation—but nobody likes an angry woman, even if they’re as beautiful as Anne or Penelope. Even women reviewers over the last decades seem careful to put distance between themselves and this narrator’s anger, even though it’s easy to see what she’s so upset by. Say, for example, a husband who seduces one of her friends after she loses her housing and asks to stay with them. Or maybe it’s that her husband and said friend are caught by the many (nine?) children and told that the friend, uh, fainted and Dad is just helping her. Or how about when TFG holds both his wife’s and her friend’s hands (in front of their dozen-ish children) walking back from the movies. Or when he blames his wife for all of it, because she put the temptation in front of him by giving her (former) friend a place to stay. “You won’t let me see her again, will you?” I mean, I died. The old go-to “Why don’t you consider my feelings when I’m hurting you?” that all women have seen, if not been the pummeled with, firsthand. It’s a classic for a reason.
After all that, there’s nothing more satisfying than Mortimer’s, err, the narrator’s even more casual evisceration of her husband’s very casual cruelty, which she then turns inward when the ex-husband she left for the cheater returns to her life suddenly. It’s her wit that keeps us entertained as everything begins to feel very un-funny. When the therapist suggests that she has so many children because she fears sex, her sarcasm offsets how ridiculous his analysis is. “You really should have been an Inquisitor . . . Do I burn now or later?”
Since reading this book, I have been thinking about how therapists are used in novels. Most portrayals are not that great. I recently started Zeno’s Conscience with A Public Space, and the narrator Zeno is presented as an affable dope who insults and dismisses a therapist that we see a bit more clearly; sometimes he’s encouraging of positive change, sometimes he seems silly (at least, through Zeno’s recollections). That is how many analysts are presented in 20th-century literature, and coming off Freud, I could see why. Plus, misunderstanding is the force behind of a lot of comedy. One outlier in this trend is the analyst in Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding. Remember when everyone was reading that over the summer? I love when those kinds of things happen. Vera seems like a decent and caring therapist to poor Cassandra, aside from all the drugs she’s prescribed. I had a good therapist for a few years, but I took a break at some point and then decided to put the cost toward skin care (and start a Substack? lolsob). I think about going back, but at my age, I feel like there will be a longer-term, higher ROI via serums and microcurrent devices.
Mrs. Armitage eventually disappears into “the tower,” a self-imprisonment at the family retreat years in the building that naturally wound up disappointing. Her husband finds her there. Like a coward, he sends in the children first. Her particular cleverness is distilled in the chef’s kiss of a title from the children’s rhyme that’s treated as an epigraph—you know, the one where a husband maybe keeps his wife from straying by murdering her and trapping her in a tower therapy his lies and denials pumpkin: “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater . . .” She doesn’t outright call him a cheater. Her anger is more brittle, more fragile than, say, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, in which the fury practically has the ink smoking (and why not? Team Nora). She calls him exactly what he is through a nursery rhyme for a spoiled child: Cheater, cheater . . . . It’s mean and triumphant and somehow both direct and sly.
I’ve mentioned several New York Review of Books Clasics reissues in this longer-than-I-meant post. Juno is a big fan. Here she is “admiring’ Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal:
Can you see the spots behind her ears? The perfect pumpkin-y orange. Her whole head was pumpkin orange as a puppy, but faded to white for a few years. Now the orange is coming back.
*I know I said I’d stop, but the new video is pretty fun. It’s like if The Great Gatsby took place in a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room instead of Long Island, plus Laura Dern. This is probably Juno’s favorite, actually.