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    Fay Weldon remembered: ‘She insisted that women needed more fulfilling lives’

    Lara Feigel: ‘When I first read her novels, I saw myself as a feminist reading feminist classics’ Writer and critic “We must both live our lives to the full,” Bobbo tells his wife, Ruth,
    Jan 06, 2023 6 minutes

    Lara Feigel: ‘When I first read her novels, I saw myself as a feminist reading feminist classics’

    Writer and critic

    “We must both live our lives to the full,” Bobbo tells his wife, Ruth, in The Life and Loves of a She Devil, unilaterally announcing an open marriage. She has a baby and is four months pregnant, holding her mouth together to stop herself vomiting as he talks. It’s as gleeful for the reader as it is for Ruth herself when she starts throwing food on the floor and announcing news of his sexual exploits to his parents. “But this is wonderful! This is exhilarating! If you are a she devil the mind clears at once.”

    I first met Fay Weldon in 1996, when I was 16 and she was 65. I was a pupil at the girls’ school where she had once gone, and I interviewed her for the school newspaper. I fell for her tinkly laugh and her characteristic mix of didacticism and unruliness, and then

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