How long does it take to read The Pumpkin Eater?
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer takes about 4 hours 4 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 4 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1962. 222 pages, about 61,050 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 47 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 4 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 33 minutes |
The page count is the median across 33 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist’s couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a vast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful screenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tries to make sense of it all: doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.
Subjects: Mentally ill, Divorce, Fiction, Mental illness, Fiction, biographical, London (england), fiction
