Alabama humorist’s newest collection focuses on domestic life | DON NOBLE

After a truly wonderful comic novel, “Eating the Cheshire Cat,” set in Tuscaloosa, in sorority houses and even on the football field, Helen Ellis published “American Housewife,” a volume of stories — presumably fictional, and also very funny.

In one piece, she explains, to a readership that is largely north of D. C., that “she’s a character” means drunk, “she has a good time” means slut, “Is this too dressy?” means “I look fabulous and it would be in your best interest to tell me so.” “What do you think about her?” is code for “I don’t like her.”

More: Memoir reveals humorist’s painful marital secrets | DON NOBLE

Her biting and sometimes saucy humor carried over then into two volumes of personal essays, essentially memoir: “Southern Lady Code” and “Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light.”

Many of the pieces in “Southern Lady Code” benefit from Ellis’ takes on what it is like to live in Manhattan, in an apartment, with her second-generation Greek husband, after having grown up in Alabama, and how the newcomer, the "fish out of water" can sometimes see things more clearly than the native.

(The Southerner in the North, explaining the South to the Yankees, has a long and distinguished history, and it is ongoing.

The tradition may have its most important literary source in William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936). Quentin Compson, in his cold, dark dorm room at Harvard, talks for hours with his Canadian roommate, Shreve, as they seek to untangle the complicated saga of Thomas Sutpen back in Mississippi. Shreve, like millions of Yankees before and since, is fascinated, and in one of Faulkner's most quoted moments says to Quentin: "Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."

For the record, there are few books of Southerners touring the North and reporting back to their fellows at home. Southerners like Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe and many others go north and stay.)

“Bring Your Baggage” continues Ellis’ life story, now with slightly older women friends who are dealing with plastic surgery, mammograms and menopause. All of this seems intimate, personal.

This new volume, “Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge: Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage,”” is more memoir than essays, is even more personal, and is narrow in scope since Ellis and her husband during the New York City COVID lockdown were, like all the rest of us, forced to be together, for months, at home, almost all the time.

The first chapter is about her husband’s snoring. All husbands snore. She and her girlfriends discuss the various remedies for this: kick the husband, get earplugs, buy a white noise machine, nasal strips, finally, CPAP machines. This is a real problem, but not intrinsically funny.

One chapter is in the form of instructions to the cat sitter. These cats — two — are fussier eaters than French royalty and delicate as Hapsburgs. There are bags of dry food, food in cans, food in wet pouches. Use a clean dish at each feeding or the orange cat will get “chin acne,” and the old one will barf.

And although these cats are pampered as if they were Ming dynasty royalty with bound feet, it is imperative that no window be opened from the bottom because, in an attempt to escape, they will leap through the crack to their deaths several floors below. Flush for everything because, even though they have water bowls, “the cats drink out of the toilets.”

“Married with Plants” is, of course, about house plants. Ellis used to have a “black thumb.” Now, however, she has 27 flourishing plants. Her friend upon entering says “It’s a jungle in here.” We also learn about her antique telephones and her eclectic art collecting, which stretches the definition of art, pretty hard, but it is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder.

This is a happy marriage and, as Tolstoy put it in “Anna Karenina,” all happy families are alike.

Well, maybe they used to be. But they aren’t any more.

Ellis and her girlfriends discuss their married intimate lives. One friend reports that with her 50-year-old husband it’s not great, but: “Cold pizza is still pizza.”

Ellis’ husband, three months into lockdown, got a prescription for Viagra. “I mean, why not?” she writes, “… what else were we going to do?”

Tolstoy did not foresee this development.

Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.

“Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge: Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage”

Author: Helen Ellis

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 203

Price: $26 (Hardcover)

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Humorist’s newest collection focuses on domestic life | DON NOBLE