Jean Kerr #3 -- one of the original desperate housewives

In this series, I've been looking at the work of essayists and humorists who influenced me when I was a teenager. I spent the summer I was 17 searching the public library for writers whose work on which I could model my own stuff. Today is the third of a three-part tribute to Jean Kerr.


Phyllis Diller made her stand-up comedy debut at The Purple Onion in 1955. At that time, author Peg Bracken had yet to publish her I Hate To Cook Book (1960).  The  Women's Liberation Movement had not  grown from with the publication of Betty Friedan's groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique (1963). In the near future, Joan Rivers would start writing for "The Ed Sullivan Show," but would not start doing  stand up comedy on the show till 1966. And The Diary of a Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman would hit the bestseller list, but only the year after Joan Rivers first did comedy on television.

So when Please Don't Eat the Daisies was published in 1957, there were two women's voices in American culture talking about women's lives in a funny way: Phyllis Diller and Joan Kerr.  

Daisies was the first collection of Kerr's magazine essays (you can read it online here), and this literary sensation was followed by other collections: The Snake Has All the Lines (1960), Penny Candy (1970),  and a best-of collection (pulled mostly from the previous books) called How I Got To Be Perfect (1979).

[You can read The Snakes Has All The Lines online for free here.]

{Read Penny Candy online here.]

[Here's where to read How I Got To Be Perfect online.]   


Jean Kerr was not nearly as self-deprecating as either Phyllis Diller or Joan Rivers. But like her contemporary Shirley Jackson, who also ended up writing for women's magazines to bring in a paycheck, Jean Kerr wrote a lot about her husband, children, diets, popular culture, and the management of her house.

While Shirley Jackson lived in an academic community and was an avid reader, and could include a little of that world in her work, Jean Kerr had something else to bring, too. She'd written a number of plays for Broadway. This let her  mix in some showbiz stuff amid tales of dinner table conversations with small children. For example, here's a bit from "The Care and Feeding of Producers":

By the time Please Don't Eat the Daisies was published, Kerr was already famous, both as a playwright and as the wife of theater critic Walter Kerr. This meant sitting through many, many terrible shows, as Kerr documents in "One Half of Two on the Aisle":

Earlier I mentioned both Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers, who both had a lot to say about romance and marriage. Both used a comedy style which see-sawed between complaints-victimhood and mockery-revenge. 

Jean Kerr also wrote about men, women, and marriage, but her humor, if sometimes as pointed as the standup comics', portrays relationships as an nonstop marital arena where fair fights are staged. For instance, here's a little bit from a parody of a magazine quiz, with a bit of "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" thrown in. In Jean's "test," men and women are given options for the best relationship-salvaging responses.

What originally attracted me (and a lot of other readers) to Jean Kerr's work is the simple fact that she's so funny, especially when giving us a quick sketch of someone. The collection How I Got To Be Perfect has a wonderful word-portrait called "My Wild Irish Mother." Here's a little anecdote from it:

And this is the kind of writing which makes me keep one of Jean's back-cover author photos on my desk. 

Next week: Clarence Day

Garbo