The Edible Woman

Well you had to think this run of great reads would have to end… it did.  What a hugely disappointing book by Margaret Atwood, whose book The Handmaid’s Tale I really enjoyed… not this one, The Edible Woman (it was her first, let’s cut her a break, right? NO.).  First the detail and detail...and detail in describing the moment was a bore.  Marian, the central character, falls in love (well not really I think), she succumbs to what any woman should do (well at least how Atwood presents her) by choosing to marry a man who helps create her current persona.  You know that won’t last, especially when she is out on the road doing her day job, interviewing men and their beer habits.  She finds Duncan, a graduate student and over time she begins an affair of sorts, yes it finally culminates in sex with him when she abruptly leaves the “coming out party” right before her engagement party.  Peter, the fiance, has been allowed, yes I will say allowed, by Marian, to become the woman he says she ought to be (I guess a metaphor for male domination of the 1960s, when the book was written).  Lot in this huh?  Well, heck no, Marian’s roommate, Ainsley,  has her own drama, in wanting to get pregnant and does with Marian’s unsuspecting friend, Len.  But as Marian “frees herself” from the male version of whom she should become, Ainsley slips into the stereotypical woman (or how Atwood clearly is trying to illustrate it), by getting pregnant intentionally as a single woman, then getting scared and needing a husband – yes, meets him at the wacky coming out party.  A feminist nightmare (Ainsley) and a hero for Marian, I would suggest not!  Through an eating disorder by Marian, well she can’t eat she needs to be thin like males think woman should be!  Do I sound angry?  Not really.  Just find the whole story line uninteresting and lacks the meaning I think Atwood may want the reader to have.  The title doesn’t really capture the story, well Marian and her new boy-toy Duncan eat the “woman cake” she makes to share with her ex-fiancé, at this point, to illustrate she is free to be who she wants to be, a fat, single sexed-up woman.  Skip it.  Not worth your time.