Cracker Factory — Joyce Rebeta-Burditt

Published in 1977, Joyce Burditt-Rebeta's THE CRACKER FACTORY was one of the great bestsellers of the decade, going through at least 14 printings by 1980. There's a reason for that: it is one of the most compulsively readable novels I have encountered, a novel that I picked up one Saturday afternoon and read all the way to the end in a single sitting.

The novel concerns Cassie Barrett, a 1970s Cleveland housewife who seems to have everything the American dream requires: a nice looking husband, three children, and a comfortable home. And she hates her life. She hates it so much that she turns to the bottle for comfort--and on the novel's first page awakens with a horrible hangover to discover that she has been committed to the psych ward of a local hospital. For the second time. But will another stay at "the cracker factory" prove any more beneficial to her than the first? She has her doubts.

Writing in the first person, Burditt-Rebeta captures Cassie, her family, her doctor and nurses, and her fellow patients with sharp perception and tremendous witt--and Cassie herself is one of the funniest, most irreverent women of 20th Century popular fiction I've ever met, capable of making you laugh and then cry within a single sentence. And her adventures, both with those around her and inside herself, are memorably portrayed.