New York Times Bestseller: This anthology of Erma Bombeck’s most memorable and humorous essays is a tribute to one of America’s sharpest wits.
When she began writing her regular newspaper column in 1965, Erma Bombeck’s goal was to make housewives laugh. Thirty years later, she had published more than four thousand columns, and earned countless laughs—from housewives, presidents, and everyone in between....

"Bucolic Newport Cove, where spontaneous block parties occur on balmy nights and all of the streets are named for flowers, is proud of its distinction of being named one the top twenty safest neighborhoods in the US. It's also one of the most secret-filled. Kellie Scott has just returned to work after a decade of being a stay-at-home mom. She's adjusting to high heels, scrambling to cook dinner for her family after a day at the office -- and soaking...

Structured as a daybook of sorts, with the Cursing Mommy -- beleaguered wife of Larry and mother of two boys, twelve and nine -- trying (more or less) valiantly to offer tips on how to do various tasks around the home, only to end up on the ground, cursing, surrounded by broken glass. Her voice is somewhere between Phyllis Diller's and Sylvia Plath's: a hilariously desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red wine, who speaks...

For his first studio picture, John Waters took advantage of his biggest budget yet to allow his muse Divine to sink his teeth into a role unlike any he had played before: Baltimore housewife Francine Fishpaw. Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine turns to the bottle as her life falls apart, until deliverance appears...

On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien...

"When Milwaukee wife and mother M.J. Boudreaux realizes that her husband Chris seems more interested in spending time at the casino than he does with her, she seeks out an activity that they can do together to reignite their flame, and it seems that poker is her best bet. Although it doesn't give her the quality time with Chris that she'd hoped, M.J. finds she has a natural knack for the game. Increasingly unhappy at home, she turns to the felt of...

When her contractor's unfaithful wife is brutally murdered, former TV anchorwoman Ali Reynolds sets out to prove the husband's innocence in spite of skepticism on the part of Ali's detective boyfriend, a situation that strains their relationship and catches the attention of the real killer.