Queen for a Day: A Novel in Stories

Mimi Slavitt's three-year-old son is autistic, but if we told her, she wouldn't listen, because she doesn't want to know--until at last his behavior becomes so strange that even she can't ignore it. Mimi inhabits a world nearly as isolating as her son's--one that she shares with mothers like her, chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, fighting heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach.

In chapters told from Mimi's point of view and theirs, we meet these mothers, each a complex character totally unsuitable for sainthood and dreaming of the day she can just she walk away. Taking its title from the 1950s reality show that made suffering housewives compete against each other for deluxe refrigerators and life-saving operations, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women under enormous pressure.

Rosaler tells their story in ironic, precise and vivid prose, with dark humor and insight born of first-hand experience.

Author: Maxine Rosaler
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 06/11/2019
Pages: 250
Weight: 0.6lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781883285814

About the Author
Rosaler, Maxine: - Maxine Rosaler's fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, Fifth Wednesday, Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review and other literary magazines. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction. Stories of hers have been cited in editions of Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She lives in New York City with her husband, Phillip Margulies.