Big Girls Don't Cry

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