Review: The Mad Wife by Meagan Church

Lulu Mayfield is the perfect 1950s housewife. She is the neighborhood's reigning Queen of Gelatin Salads. Married for 5 years, she and her husband have a young son and Lulu has just given birth to a second baby, a daughter. She had severe post-partum depression after her first baby and is spiraling again. Her neighbors and friends are trying to keep an eye on her but they are busy with their own lives and their non-negotiable weekly schedules for shopping, cleaning, and other household tasks. When a new neighbor named Bitsy moves in, Lulu becomes obsessed with Bitsy and her family. Bitsy's husband seems controlling, their daughter is unnaturally quiet and compliant, and Bitsy herself is a little off.

This is a harrowing tale of the appalling state of health care, especially mental health care, for women in the 1950s but it has more than a few echoes today. The middle portion, as Lulu sinks further and further, is painful for the reader to witness. Given the limited third person narration focused solely on Lulu's thoughts and actions, the reader can only follow where Lulu leads, into her past on her family's farm, in her present with an overbearing and unsympathetic mother in law and an unobservant husband, and in the fixations of a mind trying to protect her amidst her unhealthy preoccupations. The ending of the book is absolutely unexpected and heart breaking.