Mad Dog Mom: And Other Hair-Raising Domestic Phenomena

Working mothers will love this collection of essays by Murphy, a columnist for Over the Mountain Journal in Birmingham, Alabama, who is less than triumphant about trying to juggle job and home. Not a collection of her newspaper columns, this hilarious book focuses on four of the author's chief concerns--food, clothing, shelter, air. At the start, Murphy boasts she's a lousy chef who hates cooking and is lucky to be married to a man whose mother also lacked talent in the kitchen: her husband ""grew up thinking that Alka-Seltzer was an after-dinner drink."" So her family subsists largely on pizza and Big Macs. But the time Murphy is spared from the stove is dedicated to the washer and dryer, because the hamper is never empty--nor are the closets, a special source of trouble in a family of four pack rats. Escape? Annually she plans a two-week family vacation, noting that the very term is an oxymoron; even a three-hour group excursion to a baseball game can result in disaster. Murphy sums it up in the title of the last chapter, ""Conclusion (As If There Is One)."" (Nov.)