Wifey is tired of chicken on Wednesdays

This weekend I zipped right through the next guilty pleasure book from my Literacy Austin Booksale spree, Wifey by Judy Blume (1978). This book notes on its cover that it is "an adult novel," most likely to differentiate it from Blume's well-loved books for children and young adults (do not make the move from Superfudge to Wifey, kids).

I was one of those girls that read every single available Judy Blume book twice, including Forever, the very special young adult novel where the main characters actually have sex. And somehow I totally missed this one. Which is too bad because I imagine I would have found the rather tame sex scenes to be pretty exciting when I was twelve. Twenty-nine year old Kristy, however is not so easily impressed.

In Wifey, our main character, Sandy, is an upper-middle class housewife in a sexually unfufilling marriage. She doesn't have anything to do except watch the kids and go to The Club to play golf with her sister. Except the kids are at camp and Sandy hates golf. As her feelings of frustration mount, a strange man keeps riding up to her house on a motorcycle while she is alone and jerking off while she watches from the window. Then she has sex with her brother-in-law at a drunken party. Then an old flame comes back into her life and she has a little affair. All this sex is peppered with hints that it is 1978 and Sandy is thinking a bit about feminism and a life beyond housework and dutiful sex. When her rekindled flame refuses to leave his wife for her, Sandy must decide if she should divorce her husband anyway and try life as an individual, or try to make her marriage work. And on top of all that, she has gonorrhea! Poor gal...

I found the ending to be pretty disappointing, but I don't know that a super-woman's-lib freedom ending would have satisfied me any more. The book as a whole was an engaging read, and the characters (especially Sandy) were as nicely developed as you would expect Blume's characters to be.