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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 (5):
  • First Published:
  • Sep 1, 1998, 352 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 1999, 352 pages
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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.

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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.

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Read-Alikes

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