Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (American Lives) [Paperback]

Mimi Schwartz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2003 | Series: American Lives

In this startlingly funny and wonderfully honest book of essays, Mimi Schwartz describes what it means to be married for almost forty years. She writes with a keen and amused eye about growing up in an immigrant Jewish family, coming of age in New York in the 1950s, marrying her high school beau, and then arriving at feminist consciousness in the 1970s like so many others of her generation. But unlike many of her contemporaries who left first marriages for independence, Schwartz stayed loyal to her marriage.

 

With refreshing candor Schwartz describes the ongoing challenge of marriage, where success is never without ambivalence and humor. Her essays are wise and warm without being sentimental, and the characters in Schwartz's world are quirky and as charming, well rounded, and complex as those found in any novel.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Schwartz (Writing for Many Roles), a professor of writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, has collected here some 40 loosely chronological vignettes from her rather comfortable life. Reading these musings is a bit like leafing through someone's photo album here's her son's wedding, her mother-in-law's funeral, her mastectomy, her daughter's pregnancy. Apart from her bout with breast cancer and her husband's stroke, Schwartz has a reasonably happy existence, with none of the major difficulties such as abuse, divorce, disability and depression often found in memoirs. She dwells, therefore, on more mundane matters: gaining weight, her husband's medical problems, a cap she likes to wear when driving, squabbles with her husband over who forgot the road map and organizing family get-togethers. But a few gems surface amid the quotidian onslaught. Thinking back to her horseback-riding girlhood, she realizes that "tomboys who are over fifty and under ten" have similar feelings of independence and "self-containment." The single best story actually concerns her father, who grew up in a German village, ran away to join the Kaiser's army and snuck into one of Hitler's rallies before deciding that the family should flee to America. And her subtle glass-half-full outlook will appeal to Oprah's crowd: in "Negotiating Monogamy," she describes arriving at a balance "that does not necessitate leaping into someone else's bed, just the ongoing possibility of it." In spite of its attractive cover, this slim volume is unlikely to stir much general interest, although it may inspire some readers to try writing their own stories.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This bantamweight collection of essays retains its light and sure touch, even when the subjects are breast cancer and a spouse's heart attack. The author, in her middle fifties, wanders from the prickly and familiar delights of being married to the same man for nearly four decades to growing up the child of German Jewish immigrants, reconciling life as a woman in the fifties and in the seventies with life now. The coming of grandchildren, the losing of parents, friends who come and go, who change and die, are her subjects, and she handles them deftly. She muses on the need for midlife change: divorce, renovation, or a new kitchen. "It must be when our bodies disappoint us, we who stay together invest in home improvement." If she skims below the surface but rarely, that's all right, too. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803292996
• ISBN-13: 978-0803292994
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,153,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For the Long Haul, February 21, 2002

By 

Yours Truly (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (Hardcover)

What makes for an enduring marriage? My reading of Mimi Schwartz is that a portion of wry detachment comes in handy. Unlike so many women of her (and my) generation who have abandoned a marriage or two on the way to professional success and personal fulfillment, Schwartz has stuck with her Stu, and he with her, and these essays often give off a bit of the tension that underlies such give and take. My standards for good memoir rest more on the quality of reflection than on the drama of the incidents,and Schwartz is a sharp observer of the everyday. But there is plenty of shadow here, most prominently her father's narrow escape from the Holocaust, a family historic event that left her not only cognizant of calamity but grateful for good fortune.Would I recommend this book for newly-weds? Maybe after the first big fight. The more battle-scarred among us will applaud the couples' continuing attraction to each other.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gift from a Queen Sized Bed, February 21, 2002

By 

donna r kaplowitz (East Lansing, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (Hardcover)

Mimi Schwartz's memoir, Thoughts from a Queen Sized Bed, had me alternately laughing out loud, and crying quietly by myself. Her book is a series of short essays about marriage, family, motherhood, illness, work, life, and more!

What is so poignant about this collection is that it is a raw, deeply honest and open memoir that reveals insights into the author's heart. But more than that, her revelations about her own life are, at times, so universal that anyone can find a thought that pertains to their own experience in the world. Her words about her life help us define our own selves more accutely.

There is a humorous chapter on a family reunion "Alan Should Have Rented a Car," that touches on everyone's experience of such an event: the joy and intensity of being with people with whom you have love, history, and future, and yet the inherent difficulty, and real frustration and saddness that such gatherings also deliver.

At times her honesty is so brutal that its makes one want to wince and look away from her pain. Her chapter on breast cancer and mastectomy, "Dreaming of Lace," was brutally honest. And yet her words make us understand the experience in a profound and yet very human way.

Other essays force us to search inside ourselves and face our own follies and foibles, as we follow along with hers. She deals with everything from friendship to betrayal, from getting lost on the way to Cape Cod (who hasn't had the argument about who forgot the map and should we ask for directions?) to finding ones way on the Galapagos Islands. She shares secrets with us about parenting her children, and watching her children become parents, and she forces us to examine our own views of death and dying as she commandingly - yet with a touch of doubt - shares her views with us.

This is a brilliant, beautiful memoir that will not only touch your heart, but aid you in knowing your own life a little deeper.

Thank you Mimi Schwartz, for such a gift!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Range of Human Concerns, March 12, 2002

By 

Andrea W. Herrmann (Little Rock, AR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (Hardcover)

A Review of Mimi Schwartz's Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed

Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed is a wonderful collection of personal essays about Schwartz's life as a single then a married woman, as a wife and mother, and as a women committed to her own profession. These snapshots of her life--portrayed with humor, sensitivity, and insight-make fascinating reading for women and men who, like the author, lived through the 50s and 60s and who can easily identify with her dilemmas. But it also provides other readers with an insightful peek into living, dating, and marrying in an earlier era.

In Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, one encounters a range of human concerns, among them: the tensions of being a first generation American, and a Jew, in a culture of mostly established Gentiles; the desire to stay slim, attractive, and healthy in world where women weren't expected to be athletic; the stresses of juggling marriage, the demands of motherhood, and a successful career... [and] the temptations to stray from a long term marriage....
I found reading this book a great pleasure. Schwartz has mastered the form of the personal essay, and her craft is evident on every page. In "A Night for Haroset," for example, she recounts a family Passover Seder that is rich with overtones of the couple's recent illnesses, of Schwartz's fragile connection to Judaism, and of interfamilial tensions.

The family is alive and well in these essays, and I hated to have to stop reading. Had there been more, I would have gleefully continued making a glutton of myself.