Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Summary and Reviews of Big Girls Don't Cry by Fay Weldon

Big Girls Don't Cry by Fay Weldon

Big Girls Don't Cry

by Fay Weldon
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • First Published:
  • Sep 1, 1998, 352 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 1999, 352 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

Chronicles five women's attempts and failures to create a new life. A farcical story about women who - new politics aside - can't quite see past the allure of power and bad men.

One balmy evening in 1971, an unlikely group of women meet in a cramped living room in the suburbs of London. There's Layla, a sexy, irreverent bombshell; Alice, a serious academic; Zoe, a new mother who's frightened of her feminist-hating husband; Stephanie, a pretty, soft-spoken wife of a womanizing antiques dealer; and Nancy, newly single after leaving her no-sex- before-marriage fiancé at their London youth hostel. All twenty-something, all fed up with their lives and their men, they decide to form Medusa, a feminist publishing house.

Big Girl's Don't Cry is a comedy in the classic Weldon tradition. Against the backdrop of failing families, husband swapping, and suburban tedium, Big Girl's Don't Cry chronicles five women's attempts and failures to create a new life. In her most refreshing novel ever, Fay Weldon has written a farcical story about women who -new politics aside- can't quite see past the allure of power and bad men.

The world envied them, derided them, adored, loathed and pitied them by turns - these women who were larger than life. Layla, Stephanie, Alice, Nancy and company - a small, vivid group of wild livers, free-thinkers, lusters after life, sex and experience, who in the last decades of the century turned the world inside out and upside down. Unable to change themselves, they turned their attention to society, and set about changing that, for good or bad.

If in achieving so much they all but destroyed themselves, who should be surprised? Being flawed, they were the stuff of tragedy as well as triumph. They walked amongst ordinary mortals like goddesses down from Mount Olympus, without so much as deigning to notice their own difference. 'Who, me?' they'd enquire, handed doctorate or writ. 'Little me?'

Others described them as feminists, but they were never quite in step; too far in front to notice what the rest were doing. Layla, Stephanie, Alice, Nancy and ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

Los Angeles Times.
No one writes about humanity's foibles quite like Fay Weldon. A hundred years hence, if people can still read, Weldon's books will likely have the unblunted edge of Jane Austin, unsentimental Baedecker guides to sexual manners in an ill-mannered age.

The Daily Telegraph (UK)
With a mind like a gimlet ... Fay Weldon is the only writer around these days to remind us of the way Bernard Shaw treated serious ideas. Big Girls Don't Cry is a tremendously entertaining comedy driven by a furious detachment.

The Daily Telegraph (UK)
With a mind like a gimlet ... Fay Weldon is the only writer around these days to remind us of the way Bernard Shaw treated serious ideas. Big Girls Don't Cry is a tremendously entertaining comedy driven by a furious detachment.

Kirkus Reviews
[A] wry and witty examination of where feminism went wrong and, occasionally right.... Weldon's clever comparisons of yesterday's mores to today's spice up this bubbling feminist brew, offering a study of the costs and consequences of the idealistic life that is sharp, funny, and all too true.

Kirkus Reviews
[A] wry and witty examination of where feminism went wrong and, occasionally right.... Weldon's clever comparisons of yesterday's mores to today's spice up this bubbling feminist brew, offering a study of the costs and consequences of the idealistic life that is sharp, funny, and all too true.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Big Girls Don't Cry, try these:

  • Turning On The Girls jacket

    Turning On The Girls

    by Cheryl Benard

    Published 2002

    About this book

    More by this author

    Cheryl Benard's deftly comic novel gives us a chance to envision a world designed by women.... It's 2000 something, the world has just been taken over by women, and things are wonderful. Meanwhile, a secret men's movement, is planning a violent uprising.

  • Female Intelligence jacket

    Female Intelligence

    by Jane Heller

    Published 2002

    About this book

    More by this author

    Female Intelligence is a hilarious look at our inability to bridge the communication gap between men and women, despite all the Mars/Venus books on the market.


More books by Fay Weldon
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...
  • Book Jacket
    The Rest of You
    by Maame Blue
    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: The power to see, to sense, and to say. ...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..