Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

The name of the book club, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons, is an act of rebellion against men’s assumptions about female communities, reflecting the husbands’ gamut of responses—curiosity, suspicion, amusement, and outright hostility over what will come of women sharing their lives, feelings, and causes. As such, AHEB becomes a symbol of rebellion, an act of solidarity and commitment to female friendship, to emotional and intellectual lives apart from motherhood, wifehood, and domesticity.

Claiming the name is initially an act of defiance; later, it celebrates the identity of shared community, one valued by each woman. The endurance of the name attests to and represents the lasting bonds between the women and their commitment to their friendships. Ultimately, the club takes on the nature of an institution. The scrapbook Faith is making at the end of the novel attests to how the club has become a locus of identity, marking friendship as well as symbolizing attachment.

Though it only features in a few scenes, the neighborhood circus symbolizes life in Freesia Court and, more generally, life in the suburban United States in the latter decades of the 20th century. The circus represents the traditions and continuity of the neighborhood as well as the community’s closeness.