Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife

by Niamh Greene

[Leah]

At the beginning of this year (2010) I read Letters To A Love Rat by Niamh Greene. I’d heard a lot about Niamh’s books so I was pleased to find a second hand copy of Letters To A Love Rat. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t really like the book. However I was told that Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife was miles better so when I saw it in the charity shop I decided to pick it up. I began reading it while I was waiting to have my hair cut and I was soon hooked, thoroughly enjoying peeking into the diary of a so-called demented housewife.

Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife, as you might expect, chronicles a year in the life of Susie, who is married to Joe and has two kids called Jack and Katie and is told in the form of diary entries. It’s very Bridget Jones’-esque, should Bridget have had a husband and two kids (I haven’t read The Edge of Reason so have no idea if that happened). It’s a fairly simple idea for a book but it works really well and I liked being able to pick up and put down the book at will as each diary entry is fairly short with the longest being about three or four pages long. It’s also a lightweight read as you might expect, as Susie deals with being a parent to two hyper kids, as she struggles in her marriage as she’s the stay-at-home mother while husband Joe heads off to work every day and as she realises herself and VBF (Very Best Friend, duh!) Louise might be losing touch with each other.

I quite liked Susie, obviously we only know her through her diary rather than the normal story-telling we usually have but that actually works to Susie’s advantage: what better way is there to get to know someone than through their diary? A diary is where someone writes down everything that’s happening in their lives without having to censor it so we got to know everything that goes on is Susie’s life from catching nits to knowing what she really thinks of Lone Father, a man she meets at a playgroup meeting. Susie is very honest, as you might expect from a diary and although she had her moments where I just wanted to give her a shake, overall I did really like her. Because the book is told in diary format, it is hard to get a grip on the rest of the characters. Joe, Susie’s husband, came across distant and, to be honest, he barely featured in the book and it would have been nice to have seen more of him. However I loved Susie’s kids Katie and Jack, they both cracked me up completely.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed reading Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife. It was miles better than Letters to a Loverat, it made me laugh and I loved the diary format, despite the obvious similarities to Bridget Jones (I didn’t like Bridget Jones’ Diary, though). The writing was great, and I liked the fact it wasn’t broken up into chapters and that I could pick it up and put it down at will due to the gaps between diary entries, making it easy to squeeze in a page or two whenever I could. I can’t wait to pick up the next book Confessions of a Demented Housewife (The Celebrity Year) and I hope it’s just as good as Secret Diary. I would recommend the book to fans of books written completely like a diary as they’ll love it!