“There’s a fine line between madwoman and dreamer,” Maxine will observe, from the vantage of that line.

But first, Penny must stop in Santa Barbara to deal with Dr. Pincer, her cantankerous, 82-year-old grandmother, the “family’s private madwoman.”

This week’s theme is “strong independent females,” featuring a novel about a madwoman and a true-crime account of a mob murderess.

We cannot keep locking madwomen in the attic just so we can free them to cheers and sighs of relief.

Biographer Judith Thurman, writing in the New Yorker in 2001, called Dr. Milford’s biography “one of the big literary events of the feminist new wave — the first liberation of a madwoman from the attic.”