Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed

by Mimi Schwartz

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803292996
• ISBN13: 9780803292994
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed are bitter-sweet.

Mimi Schwartz's "Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed" was ordered for me as a gift. I found the book to be a most entertaining series of essays, covering a 15 years period. Particularly of interest to those of us who have been married for a number of years. I share many of Mimi's thoughts about marriage, the problems of merging a night person with a day person and it was good to see them in print. Mimi writes with honesty, humor and optimism. She has a mastectomy and husband Stu suffers a heart attack, but she is undaunted. She accepts married life with all its nuances and muses on them for our benefit. Knowing that she is loved by Stu doesn't prevent her from toying with the idea of an affair. Her husband Stu snores and she wraps her arms around him for comfort. Their marriage is like an old shoe, comfortable even if a bit shabby looking after so many years. Mimi takes us through her family history, raising children, and looking forward to grandchildren, through petty squabbles and making love after an argument. She writes from the heart. Thank you Gerry for sending me this gift. Rita Berman - author of The A - Z of Writing and Selling, 1981.

A Range of Human Concerns

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.

For Better or Worse

It is refreshing to read a book about family life that is not dysfunctional. Mimi Schwartz in her new book of essays "Thoughts From a Queen-Sized Bed," has given us a view of her life and experiences that could be anybody's "normal" family. Her thoughts on growing up, parents, love, marriage, children, celebrations, vacations, illness and death, all felt familiar and I kept finding myself nodding in agreement. In fact, in several of the essays, I thought Ms. Schwartz had been a fly on the wall of my house! I really enjoyed reading this book and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to read about life in a humorous and touching way.

For the Long Haul

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.

A gift from a Queen Sized Bed

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!