“Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies.”
Another reread for me from grad school. For whatever reason I watched the movie version of this book several times as a kid. It had Roseanne Barr as the title character, with Meryl Streep as Mary Fisher and Ed Begley as Bobbo. In the novel, Ruth’s husband Bobbo is going to leave her for Mary Fisher. Mary Fisher is dainty, pretty, and petite, and the writer of romance novels. Ruth is a mother of two, fat, and very tall. When he leaves, Ruth is able to think about what she wants for the first time in a long time, and what she wants is to really indulge in her revenge. That looks like abandoning her children — in the sense of letting her selfish husband deal with them for once in his life, getting a job, and enacting revenge on Bobbo and Mary. In order to do this she will need to undo everything she can from her life, and eventually even completely destroy her body and reinvent herself physically. Bobbo goes to jail, Mary dies, and Ruth steps right in.
This is a Madea type story, and so be forewarned that there won’t be any pulled punches, no thoughtful discussions about feminism, and no considering how to be in the world, except anyway she wants to be. The movie fails on almost every level, and when I found out that Fay Weldon recently died, I knew I wanted to revisit this one, one of her most indulgent of books.
