Big Girls Don't Cry - Softcover

Weldon, Fay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0871137593 ISBN 13: 9780871137593

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999

Synopsis

This latest offering from critically acclaimed author Fay Weldon is a darkly comic romp through the minefields of friendship and feminism. On a balmy evening in 1971, five women meet in a cramped living room in the suburbs of London. Tired of their husbands and their own unsatisfying lives, they form the aptly named Medusa, a book publishing house founded on the principle of "getting even." With wry and savvy humor, Weldon weaves us through twenty years of these women's lives, as good intentions fall by the wayside and the hazards of their new politics, sex, and infidelity take their toll.

About this title

Review

Now, from the writer who made grisly comic fodder of an ugly woman's revenge in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil comes the first novel to take the long, and caustic, view of the feminist orthodoxies of the last 30 years and the women who embraced, disseminated, and were sometimes disappointed by them. Deftly managing the biggest cast she's yet conjured, Fay Weldon recounts the 1971 founding of distaff Medusa Press by a goofily believable gaggle of British feminists--Stephanie, the beautiful one; Alice, the philosopher; Layla, the ambitious; Nancy the organized, who becomes Medusa's office manager; blonde Daffy, of the breeder urges; Zoe, the wife and mother who writes a feminist classic and commits suicide, the novel's sole victim of patriarchal oppression. Everyone else, male and female alike, is more the casualty of ideas at odds with desires and the inexorable ironies of trickster time. A lot of the comedy is deadpan, funny because it's true--who but Weldon would risk admitting that the venerable feminist saying A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle is a head-scratchingly opaque bit of sloganeering?

One of the great strengths, and charms, of Big Girls Don't Cry is that the heroines of the 1970s become the middle-aged mothers of the late 1990s; in most feminist fiction babies are burdens or betrayals, but not real people: here as in life, they are ascendant, products of their upbringing, characters to be reckoned with. Weldon's twentysomethings are as lovingly and astringently drawn as her fiftysomethings, and have as much to contribute to the clever plot. If you ever want to found a mother-daughter book club, consider making this your first selection. --Joyce Thompson

From the Back Cover

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

One balmy evening in 1971, an unlikely group of women meet in a cramped living room in the suburbs of London. There's Layla, a sexy, irreverent bombshell; Alice, a serious academic; Zo, a new mother who's frightened of her feminist-hating husband; Stephanie, a pretty, soft-spoken wife of a womanizing antiques dealer; and Nancy, newly single after leaving her no-sex-before-marriage fianc at their London youth hostel. All twenty-something, all fed up with their lives and their men, they decide to form Medusa, a feminist publishing house.

Big Girls Don't Cry is a comedy in the classic Weldon tradition. Against the backdrop of failing families, husband swapping, and suburban tedium, Big Girls Don't Cry chronicles five women's attempts and failures to create a new life. In her most refreshing novel ever, Fay Weldon has written a farcical story about women who-new politics aside-can't quite see past the allure of power and bad men.

"In our passionate and often blinkered debates about the legacy-even the survival-of feminism . . . . Weldon can be counted on for one rare quality: in her hands, nothing, truly nothing is sacred."-The New York Times Book Review

"An admirable and entirely convincing novel . . . lively, intelligent . . . unfaltering, [Weldon] resolutely declines to signal where she is or isn't joking."-The Times Literary Supplement (London)

"With a mind like a gimlet . . . Fay Weldon is the only writer around these days to remind us of the way Bernard Shaw treated serious ideas. Big Girls Don't Cry is a tremendously entertaining comedy driven by a furious detachment."-The Daily Telegraph

"Sly, arch, poised, and funny, Big Girls Don't Cry . . . is Weldon at her feisty best."-Mail on Sunday

"Big Girls Don't Cry teams with bitchy back-stabbing, liberated women . . . frantic to change the world. . . . Every page is sharp enough to draw blood, every paragraph hisses with mischief . . . Weldon piles brilliant set piece upon set piece."-Daily Mail

"Weldon's refrain . . . [and] her extraordinary characters . . . chill the heart."-London Spectator

"Weldon's clever comparisons of yesterday's mores to today's spice up this bubbling feminist brew, offering a study of the costs and consequences of the idealistic life that is sharp, funny, and all too true."-Kirkus Review

"Lack of imagination is not Fay Weldon's problem in her hilarious, caustic novel about the British women's rights movement in the last three decades."-Atlanta Journal Constitution

"[Fay Weldon] is, a comic writer who deals in serious ideas, and she does so here with a fine combination of scathing satire and nonchalant panache."-Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Weldon is a master at wicked dialogue and sharp observations. Her attention to the details and attitudes of the time is perfect."-Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

Fay Weldon was born in England and raised in New Zealand. She received her M.A. in economics and psychology from St. Andrews University in Scotland and is the author of twenty-one novels, including Worst Fears, Splitting, and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. She lives in London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0871137593
• ISBN 13: 9780871137593
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352