Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (2003) is a contemporary women’s fiction novel by bestselling American author Lorna Landvik. Over the course of three decades, five women who live on a suburban street in Minneapolis share their joys, sorrows, and eventually their secrets. They help each other through heartbreaks and triumphs, holding fast to the enduring bonds of friendship as the world changes around them. Landvik uses humor to explore the strength and value of female bonds, and portrays quirky characters in the landscape of Midwestern life.

This guide is based on the hardcover first edition published by Ballentine Books in 2003.

Content Warning: The book includes scenes of domestic abuse and marital rape, rape of a minor, anti-Black bias on the part of peripheral characters, and expressions of anti-gay bias.

Plot Summary

The novel opens in 1998 as five women sit in a hospital room. One of them—not yet identified—is ill. They laugh and reminisce, leading the nurse to think they are sisters. The novel then flashes back to a cold Minnesota March in 1968, when the five women met by having a snowball fight. Faith, who grew up in the South and just moved to Freesia Court with her pilot husband and infant twins, invites the women inside her house. As they get acquainted, they decide to start a book club.

Thereafter, the novel is told in four parts organized by decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s. Each chapter, titled with the current book club title, is narrated by the woman who chose the book and tells the intertwined stories of the five women and their neighborhood.

Merit, a pastor’s daughter who was rejected by her father when she left home, is pregnant and shocked when her husband, a doctor, begins abusing her. Slip, a small and fierce activist, has a loving husband and precocious daughter. Audrey comes from money and likes to make everything about sex, while Kari, a childless widow, nurtures everyone else. Several of the chapters conclude with letters Faith is writing to her mother. They recount Faith’s tumultuous childhood with the alcohol-dependent Primrose, each one signed, “Sorry.” As the ’60s draw to a close, three of the women have more children while Kari adopts an infant from her college-student niece. After a snide remark made at Kari’s annual Christmas party, they christen their group “Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons.”

The 1970s bring fresh challenges for the five women as they support each other as wives and young mothers. Audrey learns her husband is having an affair, and they eventually divorce. Faith worries that her son, Beau, has feminine mannerisms and seems overly sensitive. Slip is devastated when her brother is injured in Vietnam and shows symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, experiencing harrowing flashbacks. He devastates the group when he joins a book meeting and shares the horrors he witnessed in combat.

Kari is blissful in her role as Julia’s mother. Merit’s abuse by her husband Eric continues until one night, the Housewives witness him brutally beating her, and Faith threatens Eric with her husband’s gun. Faith feels increasingly on edge as she keeps her past hidden from her friends and husband, making up stories about her family. Audrey goes through a blue spell over a birthday, but is consoled by her friendship with new neighbors, Stuart and Grant, a gay couple. The Angry Housewives are on edge for a few months after Audrey and Slip quarrel, but Grant helps them make up.

The 1980s kick off with a vacation to Malibu for the Housewives and more changes for all of them. Audrey grows closer to her sons after one of them, Bryan, is injured in a car accident. Merit finds joy playing the piano and meets a man, Frank Paradise, who convinces her to play in piano bars. They begin spending more time together, and eventually fall in love. Kari experiences joys in raising Julia, and Slip is happy to see her brother Fred recover from alcohol abuse and become a peace activist.

Faith reaches a breaking point when she learns her son Beau is gay. After she reconciles with him and meets Beau’s boyfriend, Faith is finally able to tell Audrey the truth about her past and share her terrible secret: She feels responsible for the fatal car crash her mother was in while driving drunk. Once Faith’s secret is out, she feels enormously relieved, and her relationships are stronger for her newfound honesty.

The 1990s bring self-acceptance as the Housewives age. Merit marries Frank and has a fourth daughter, finding renewed joy in motherhood and her happy marriage. Audrey has a spiritual awakening after she begins attending church and trains as a youth pastor. Grant is inducted into the Angry Housewives and begins contributing books to read. Kari is devastated when she is finally ready to tell Julia about her biological mother, and Julia stops speaking to her. Fortunately, Julia is ready to reconcile when she falls in love and wants Kari to meet her husband-to-be, and Kari is overjoyed to have her daughter back.

Faith is stunned to get a letter from her biological father, and learn she has a surviving half-sister with whom she hopes to establish a relationship. However, the joys of seeing their children grow up, get jobs, and fall in love are overshadowed when Slip receives a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease. In the epilogue, the five women visit Slip in the hospital. They laugh and reminisce about their time together while Faith makes a scrapbook of the Angry Housewives capturing their finest moments and the enduring bonds that have connected them.