The Edible Woman

Someone left this book on a table at work with a note saying that it was good and whomever wanted to read it should go ahead and take it. The pages were yellowed and there was an orange "clearance 1.00" sticker on the front cover.

It has been a long time since I read Margaret Atwood's books Surfacing and The Handmaid's Tale. I read them both in college... a million billion years ago.
That was when I starting getting the itch to be done with school and go on to law school and be done with English majors and English professors and theory theory theory and deconstruction. We were always deconstructing everything. Well, I was stupid. Law school sucked some major ass and I only went for one year. It goes down in my own personal history as the most wasted year of my life, mostly because I had to study so much that I did nothing creative--absolutely nothing. It wasn't even studying, it was just mind-numbing memorizing. Of course, once entering The Workforce I quickly realized how much better it was back in school. Ah, hindsight!

Anyhow, back to The Edible Woman. It was so good that I read all over the weekend. (I'm currently reading some books that I've been reading for weeks, and two I've been reading for months. I should just give them back to the people I borrowed them from and admit, "I can't read it".) It was written in 1965 and published a few years later. It's about a woman who is engaged to be married. Her boyfriend is dull. He's a lawyer, up and coming financially. He's good-looking, dresses well, and is self-centered. Marian, the narrator, is nowhere near as "together" as he is. In one interesting part of the book, she describes how bad her kitchen has gotten. There's not once single clean dish, there's a scum on top of the cold water in the sink, the sink is piled with dishes, and the fridge is full of rotting food. After becoming engaged, Marian starts to get grossed out by meat, and then eggs, and then she's a vegan, and then a carrot one day freaks her out, too. She can barely eat. At the end she breaks free of her fiance by baking a cake in the shape of a woman and telling him to eat it instead of eating her. He thinks she's weird and he leaves. She eats the cake herself, and then she shares it with someone else. I like her because she seems really on the verge of losing it. It's kind of refreshing.

That was a horrible synopsis; I kind of feel the way you feel when you're trying to explain a dream to someone, like all bogged down and heavy. Anyway, The Edible Woman is really, really good.