Motherhood miraculously transforms a self-indulgent misanthrope into a semi-perky soccer mom and PTA volunteer who loves playing Monopoly with her children and baking cakes almost from scratch (if that is what you call a little help from a box).
But oh, how she abhors the genuinely and completely perky moms who bake moist, fluffy cakes in high altitude while simultaneously hand-sewing Halloween costumes, applying perfectly pink lipstick to evenly shaped lips and posting pictures of their homegrown tomatoes to Facebook.
Clearly, these women have never read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Ibsen or Kate Chopin, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Sylvia Plath or really anybody other than Nora Roberts or Jackie Collins. And, they probably have no clue how to spell "melancholy."
