The supposedly wealthy polo player she takes up with does too, and it’s not the only way he complicates her life. That corpse-her younger daughter-needs a funeral. Meanwhile, Mildred’s scant funds go to others. She hides the fact from Veda, who eventually finds out, accepting Mildred’s fall from grace only when Mildred assures her that it’s just a step on the path to owning her own restaurant and becoming rich. Finally, she surrenders, taking a job in a greasy spoon. Mildred doesn’t have many marketable skills, but she brushes aside a friend’s suggestion that she sell herself, pausing to reconsider only when a stern counselor at an employment agency recommends that she become a waitress: “You’ve let half your life slip by without learning anything but sleeping, cooking, and setting the table, and that’s all you’re good for.”Īs the months go by and the bills mount, she tries to find work, any work. Her older daughter, preadolescent Veda, has no end of demands even as she scorns those whom she considers “distinctly middle-class,” her 28-year-old mom included.

She’s got a hefty mortgage to pay and no way to pay it. Things quickly go further south for Mildred. (Unlike those two books, the noirest of California noirs, the only corpse to appear in Mildred Pierce dies of natural causes, the victim of a ravaging flu.) Cain’s 1941 novel Mildred Pierce, which, like his hard-boiled thrillers The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, takes a decidedly bleak view of human nature.

Her financial state worsens when, finally, she banishes her wayward spouse.Īll that happens in the first few pages of James M. Caught in the grip of the Great Depression, she bakes cakes for a couple of dollars a pop. Her husband, a “smallish man” and barely solvent real estate developer, is having a fling with a neighbor.

Mildred pierce book review