Editing Mildred Pierce (section)

==Plot==
Set in [[Glendale, California]], in the 1930s, the book is the story of a middle-class housewife, Mildred Pierce, and her attempts to maintain her family's social position during the [[Great Depression]].

Mildred [[marital separation|separates]] from Bert, her unemployed husband, and sets out to support herself and her children. After a difficult search, she finds a job as a waitress but worries that it is beneath her [[middle class]] station. More than that, she worries that her ambitious and increasingly pretentious elder daughter, Veda, will think her new job is demeaning. Mildred encounters both success and failure as she opens three successful restaurants, operates a pie-selling business and copes with the death of her younger daughter, Ray. Veda enjoys Mildred's newfound success but increasingly turns ungrateful, demanding more and more from her hard-working mother while openly condemning her and anyone else who must work for a living.

When Mildred discovers Veda's plot to [[blackmail]] a wealthy family with a fake pregnancy, she kicks her out of their house. Veda, who has been training to become an opera singer, goes on to great fame, and Mildred's increasing obsession with her daughter leads her to use her former lover, Monty (a man who, like Mildred, lost his family's wealth at the start of the Depression), and his social connections to bring Veda back into her life. Unfortunately, this means buying Monty's family estate and using her earnings to pay for Veda's extravagances. Mildred and Monty marry, but things go sour as her lavish lifestyle and neglect of her businesses impact the company's profits. Creditors line up, led by Wally, a former business associate of Bert's, with whom Mildred had a brief affair upon their separation. With no one to turn to, Mildred confesses to Bert that she has been [[embezzlement|embezzling]] money from her company in order to buy Veda's love.

Having decided that the only course of action is to ask Veda to contribute some of her now considerable earnings to balance the books{{spaced ndash}}and fearing that Wally might target her daughter's assets if they are exposed{{spaced ndash}}Mildred goes to her room to confront her. There, she finds Veda in bed with Monty, her stepfather. Monty reproaches Mildred for using him to bring Veda back and for her attitude to him as a financial dependent of hers, while Veda affects boredom but joins in to chide Mildred for embarrassing her and taking glory in her success. Mildred snaps, brutally attacking and strangling Veda, who now appears incapable of singing and loses her contract.

Weeks pass as Mildred moves to [[Reno, Nevada]], to establish residency in order to get a speedy divorce from Monty. Bert visits her. Mildred ultimately is forced to resign from her company, leaving it to Ida, a former assistant. Mildred and Bert, upon the finalization of her divorce, remarry. Veda travels to Reno and apparently reconciles with Mildred, but several months later, Veda reveals that her voice has healed and announces that she is moving to [[New York City]] with Monty. The "reconciliation" (which had been accompanied by reporters and photographers) was designed to defuse the negative publicity resulting from their affair, and it emerges the apparent loss of her voice was a ploy so that she could renege on her existing contract and be free to take up a more lucrative one offered by another company. As Veda leaves the house, a broken Mildred, encouraged by Bert, eventually says "to hell" with her monstrous daughter, and the pair agree to get "stinko" (drunk).