Hilma Wolitzer - Today a Woman went Mad in the Supermarket

Story School #2.

I love Wolitzer’s collection of stories Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket (Bloombsury 2021). This post is about the first, and titular, story in the collection.

There are so many things happening in this story that I love, that I can learn from.

Firstly, the narrator drawing attention to herself as a narrator in the opening lines lends the story a metafictionality that encourages us to think about both the art of storytelling and the ‘storyness’ of our own ordinary lives.

Secondly, the narrator’s pregnancy is absolutely essential to the way the story is told and the big ideas (or themes) of the story - though it’s not the inciting incident or the focus of the climax, for instance.

Thirdly, the supermarket. I love writing about supermarkets and I love reading about supermarkets (see this poem by Allen Ginsberg: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47660/a-supermarket-in-california).

This is my focus today.

The supermarket is absolutely integral to the story events but obviously also carries symbolic significance. In this passage we see these important elements converge, setting + the narrator’s pregnancy, to create not only the mood of the story, but to give us some clues as to the story’s meaning/s: 

Yet something seems very right to me about going mad in a supermarket: those painted oranges, threatening to burst at the navel; formations of cans armored with labels and prices and weights; cuts of meat, aggressively bloody; and crafty peaches and apples, showing only their glowing perfect faces, hiding the rot and soft spots on their undersides (Wolitzer 2021, 1-2).

It’s a vivid description that makes me see the supermarket–and the particular items–in a way I’d never seen them before. The oranges are described as ‘painted’, making them seem duplicitous, the cans become soldiers, and the peaches and apples are insidious. 

When thinking about setting, I often consult Rebecca McClanahan’s book Word Painting: a guide to writing more descriptively (Writers Digest Books, 1999). According to McClanahan:

Eudora Welty once told an interviewer “You couldn’t write a story that happened nowhere”’ … Setting grounds us, literally, in the fictional dream… Every detail that contributes to a feeling of time and place is an element of setting (McClanahan 1999, 171). 

With that in mind, here’s (part of) an exercise I give my students:

Make a list of places you’ve been in the last 24 hours. Choose one of these places and describe it in detail. Then, make it dangerous. 

• Is it physically threatening? (deserted road, dank alleyway)

• Is it psychologically threatening? (school principal’s office, the hair salon, your mother-in-law’s kitchen, a house party where you know nobody, staff room)

‘Dangerous places suggest trouble. And trouble is one of the keys to compelling stories’ (McClanahan 1999, 175-176).

What could you do with a library? A playground? What might this description suggest about the person perceiving this place?