The Cursing Mommy's Book Of Days

Bored and frustrated suburban housewife and mother Linda, aka the Cursing Mommy, curses every moment she's alive and has to put up with her life. Plagued with an unambitious and lazy husband who lives in his own world and doesn't help out in hers, she's also afflicted with an aging father with dementia who just won't and two sons whose own particular ways take too much time away from her book club and her drinking scotch. Using her day-book as an invitation into the story of her life and woes, Linda invites her dear readers to accompany her day-by-day through one year of her crazy, rotten, desperate life. Drawing on his New Yorker columns featuring the cursing mommy, essayist Frazier builds this ramshackle and rambling novel around this profane mother who appears to have watched one too many teenage gross-out movies and who copes with life with a salty tongue and a shallow mind. While Frazier's so-called novel tries valiantly to skewer the superficiality of suburban soccer moms with his satire, his main character's tiresome tirades quickly wears on the reader. (Oct.)