Helen Ellis Books In Order
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Eating The Cheshire Cat | (2000) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
What Curiosity Kills | (2010) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Collections
American Housewife | (2016) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Southern Lady Code | (2019) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light | (2021) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge | (2023) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Anthologies
Helen Ellis is a young adult fantasy author that is best known for her novel “Eating the Cheshire Cat.” She always loved reading even when she was just a little girl. Her first introduction to serious literature was when her mother drove her town to get Judy Blume’s “Are You There, God? Its Me Margaret,” which had been banned then.
She read the work more than a hundred times and would go on to write about it in her Ziggy diary when she was in the 4th grade. But it would take a fifteen year struggle before she published her debut novel “Eating the Cheshire Cat.”
Helen would then become very popular when she wrote the twisted and hilarious take on domesticity in the collection titled “American Housewife.” She got much of what she wrote in the collection from her twitter handle @WhatIDoAllDay.
Some of the stories were narrated by blocked and frustrated writers that had been beaten down by repeated rejections.
The author Helen Ellis was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and was the daughter of a poker father that had taught gher the ins and outs of poker by the time she was six. She also has a super strict southern mother and their combined parenting was all she needed to get the confidence she needed.
By the time she was twenty two years old, she moved to New York to chase the dream of becoming a famous author. Helen tried and failed for several years and decided to attend graduate school but got rejected by practically every one she applied to.
It was at this time that she wrote her debut novel “Eating the Cheshire Cat” in retaliation. The novel got her a book deal, a fully funded book tour and a ton of cash and she thought she had it made. But soon after she experienced a sackful of rejection that she stopped writing to become a housewife.
As a housewife, she learned a bunch of rules, most of which came from her southern upbringing. It was at this time that she started writing on “@WhatIDoAllDay,” an anonymous Twitter account where she started writing. Using her southern code, she wrote “American Housewife,” her bestselling title that brought her back into the spotlight.
As for Helen Ellis’s inspirations, she has greatly been influenced by Stephen King and has read “On Writing” several times over the years. She has used many of the rules suggested by King to write her own works, even though her writing method has had several modifications over the past two decades.
When she was in graduate school, she used to write 1500 words everyday just like Stephen King, her mentor. She wrote much of this in the mornings just before she left to go work a day job. Nowadays she no longer strictly adheres to the 1500 words a day rule as she feels she can write in bursts and still get something good out there.
Ellis currently has several titles to her name that include “Saving the Cheshire Cat,” the “Turning” series and the “American Housewife” collection.
Helen Ellis’ novel “American Housewife” introduces readers to American women who wear sunscreen, pearls and lipstick even when it is dry. They pinwheel, casserole and pump the salad spinner as if it was the perfect CPR dummy.
Things get interesting when a party crasher is killed and they have to carefully move around the corpse trying to get their cookies out of the oven.
Ellis writes a dozen stories that take her readers from the set of a reality television show that screamed rigged to a Manhattan building that has been haunted even before the First World War. From the getaway car of a pageant princess to the bizarre initiation ritual at a book club.
Nutty, fresh and vicious, American housewife is a pointed and uproarious commentary on womanhood. It is a delightfully unhinged, funny and sharp collection of stories about the dark world of domesticity.
“Southern Lady Code” by Hellen Ellis is a collection of essays in which the author provides some succinct advice on how to relate to others. She gives advice on anything from how to talk to other people in sensitive ways to how to apologize to another when they have offended you.
Over nearly two dozen essays, the author becomes something of a dominatrix. Donna Reed inadvertently steals a Burberry trench coat worth nearly $800, gets the confidence of a drag queen when she finds a black tie gown, and is witness to the faking of a man’s death in the thick of a raucous party.
She had left rural Alabama and headed to New York and during this time she had left behind the puffy headbands of youth, forgotten how to drive a car but would never let go of her Southern accent.
She offers her readers a singular even if hilarious take on womanhood.
Helen Ellis’s novel “Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light” opens to Helen and her many friends arriving for a reunion at the French Riviera. They are unpacking more than their luggage as they have stories of lost jobs, husbands and kids and lost parents on photographs that one could only hold by the edges.
They share sunscreen with SPF by a degree of magnitude many times greater than their sprayed hair. They have all had to deal with some scary diagnosis but nothing fazes them even as their bond only gets stronger.
Ellis writes some moving and very hilarious essays in this collection. She explores married middle age sex gathers the courage to ask if her menopause has just arrived or has been there all along. She also goes to the hospital and is injected with silicon to cure her double chin while a psychic exorcises everyone’s sorrows.
The novel reads like some very rucosu cocktail party as it comes alive with ferocious love for friends and sensational humor that will get its readers into uproarious laughter. It comes with emotional generosity and raw vulnerability which brings Helen Ellis to another whole level.
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