The Book Club for Troublesome Women

A rented typewriter becomes Margaret's secret rebellion

In the brand-new suburb of Concordia, Virginia, 1962, thirty-three-year-old Margaret Ryan poured herself into creating a perfect first Christmas—handmade garlands, homemade eggnog, a special-order turkey.

A rented typewriter becomes Margaret's secret rebellion

In the brand-new suburb of Concordia, Virginia, 1962, thirty-three-year-old Margaret Ryan poured herself into creating a perfect first Christmas—handmade garlands, homemade eggnog, a special-order turkey. Instead, all three children fell ill with the flu, the turkey spoiled in the car, and Walt gave her a used magazine subscription while she'd traded her precious Green Stamps for his gold cuff links. The fight sent him to sleep in the den with Jack Daniel's. Days later, Margaret spotted an essay contest in a women's magazine and a typewriter on sale nearby. She rented the machine for eight dollars a month, hid it behind the towels, and began writing in secret while her family slept. She named it Sylvia. The first key she struck was the first crack in the life she was supposed to be living.

Margaret's new neighbor agrees to a book club—on her terms

At Mayer's Drugstore, Margaret watched a woman in a full-length mink coat berate the pharmacist over a Miltown prescription, then vanish through the door with the force of someone who expected glass to yield. When the neighborhood gossip reported this new neighbor had spent time in a psychiatric hospital, Margaret baked sugar cookies and marched to the three-story Tudor on the corner. Charlotte Gustafson answered barefoot, paint-spattered, and unimpressed. Margaret blurted out an invitation to a book club she had not yet formed. Charlotte dismissed the first suggestion—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—as juvenile, then thrust a red-covered book into Margaret's hands. She would join only if they read The Feminine Mystique, a new work she called earth-shatteringly brilliant. Otherwise, what was the point?

Four strangers trade secrets over vodka stingers and become the Bettys

Margaret's elaborate appetizers—including a salmon spread molded into a fish—couldn't salvage a stalled discussion. Viv Buschetti, a forty-one-year-old mother of six and former army nurse, wouldn't engage. Bitsy Cobb, the youngest at twenty-three, sat hunched and silent. Charlotte was losing patience. Then she raided the liquor cabinet and returned with four glasses of chartreuse cocktail she called truth serum. The vodka stingers worked. Viv blurted that she was pregnant with her seventh child. Bitsy revealed her husband King had fathered another woman's child years ago yet blamed Bitsy for their failure to conceive. Margaret confessed the secret typewriter and her rejected essay, which arrived that very evening. But so did a phone call from a magazine editor named Leonard Clement, offering her a column. The Bettys were born.