November 15, 2023

Something Borrowed: The Edible Woman

It’s been awhile since I did a #somethingborrowed, acknowledging the parts of my novel ASKING FOR A FRIEND that were inspired by factors beyond my imagination. Savvy readers might have discerned the debt I owe to Margaret Atwood, and her 1969 novel THE EDIBLE WOMAN, which I’ve not read for years and years, but whose image has stayed with me of a monstrously pregnant woman called Clara who is lying, TRAPPED, supine on a chaise longue in the chaos of her backyard/domestic life. To me that image/scene stands for the way that motherhood can make our friends wholly unfamiliar to us, both in body and in mind, and that sense of estrangement was something I built my narrative around (even to the point of stealing my character’s name from Atwood’s story!). Though when I went back recently and found the scene, I learned that I’d remembered parts of it wrong. It was not a chaise longue at all that Clara was sitting in, but “a round wicker basket chair with metal legs,” and she’s not rendered enormous by her pregnancy either, rather, “she looked like a boa constrictor that has swallowed a watermelon.” But all the same, Atwood’s scene planted a seed from which my novel grew.

PS the most remarkable thing about my Seal paperback copy of THE EDIBLE WOMAN is that it is—most ironically—the only volume in my entire library that has been LITERALLY eaten. Head to my video where you’ll see the little hole that was bored into my copy by an actual BOOKWORM. I discovered the damage because there was a tiny pyramid of dust on the shelf from the boring. The hole is so neat and tidy and I’m obsessed with it.