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

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 a year later I found myself working for the property dealers next door to the house she shared with her husband Nick. I wrote her a note and she phoned the office straight away, inviting me for the first in a summer of lunches. There was a study, lined with her books, and she gave me all of them, and then the new ones as they came out, almost every year.

The novels, as I read them then and have reread since, opened up a world of put-upon, often unattractive women, neglected and sometimes abused by men, who find ways to retaliate with fury, seduction and devilry. They are tales of the horrors and delights of domestic life in the suburbs and countryside, of vol-au-vents thrown to the floor in rage, of tears shed in cooking pots that can just as easily be bubbling up a witches’ brew as a family hotpot. Her first, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967, a few years after Doris Lessing and Mary McCarthy had made women’s bodily lives the subject of fiction with new zest and detail. Fay Weldon followed suit, writing about women’s appetites, and about our experiences of sex and pregnancy and childbirth. In her 1980 novel Puffball, the sheer alien craziness of pregnancy sparks a story where the life of the womb takes on more agency than the life of the people surrounding it.

When I first read those novels, I saw myself as a feminist reading feminist classics. I hadn’t expected them to be so funny, or so full of women’s desire and need for men. Weldon, in the 1960s, insisted in Technicolor, zippy prose that women needed more fulfilling lives, that femininity was dangerously defined by appearance, that men needed to take more responsibility for the raising of the next generation. By the time I was reading her, these views had become mainstream and readers were becoming troubled by how old-fashioned the feelings pulsing through these women were. “Hate obsesses and transforms me,” Ruth says in The Life and Loves of a She Devil, “it is my singular attribution”. There’s strength here, but it’s strength ignited by her love of her husband.

This was, I see now, a provocative lesson in understanding how often our feelings are at odds with our views. Fay’s particular bravery was her preparedness to acknowledge this. She’s remembered now for the more outrageous of her pronouncements. I was shocked when, emerging from university, Fay told me that I needed to find a boyfriend who was taller, older, richer and cleverer than I was, so that I could respect him. I didn’t agree, and I could feel the strain of her insisting to herself on her husband’s superiority in her own marriage. But her words came back to me when I found myself marrying a man with many of those attributes, and I couldn’t quite dismiss them. As I got older I saw that I too had feelings that didn’t fit easily with my views. I think that Fay showed me the value of opening myself to ambivalence and contradiction and seeing these as a source of revelation.

I last saw her last summer, in a nursing home in a suburb of Northampton which could have been the setting for one of her novels. She could no longer write, or speak clearly; I don’t think this was a stage of life she’d have been sorry not to prolong. But she still wanted to exchange gossip and she still wanted to be read. I wanted then to find a way to spark a revival in reading her novels, and am sad that it’s her death that is making that happen. But her books are there, ready for a new generation to take in their contradictions, their outrageousness, their sharp, skewering prose. She was a workaholic and a glamour puss, a hedonist and a moralist, a crowd-pleaser and an aesthete, a prankster with a deeply serious take on women’s lives. We need all that now, and, from Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch to Lara Williams’ Supper Club, there are plenty of young contemporary novelists writing new she devils into being, plenty waiting to take the energy from the earth and to use it as fuel for rage as Fay Weldon’s does:

In the end I sucked energy out of the earth. I went into the garden and turned the soil with a fork, and power moved into my toes and up my stubborn calves and rested in my she devil loins: an urge and an irritation. It said there must now be an end to waiting: the time for action had come.

Novelist and critic

The first time that I met Fay Weldon I was 13. She had left her husband, Ron, and I was witnessing the tenancy agreement between Fay and my mother to rent our basement in Primrose Hill.

I had never met a female novelist before, and Fay did not look at all like my childish conception of one. She was plump and pretty and teasingly jolly, and she gave us a copy of one of her novels, Down Among the Women (which she inscribed to my mother and “the landlady’s daughter”). We were not as flattered by this as we should have been, and soon after Fay became successful enough to be interviewed by the Guardian, complaining about her rental’s “thick saucepans and thin sheets”, or perhaps the other way around. At any rate, my mother took umbrage.

I, however, liked her. She was proud of her success as an advertising copywriter – which influenced my own decision to try advertising in turn – but never full of herself. A decade later, when I returned to live in a different rented basement in the same street, we met again. I was very surprised that she remembered me, given how few people take any notice of teenagers, but she did – and even apologised for her comments in that interview. We became friendly, despite the 30-year age gap. She was astute about other people in the literary world without ever (as far as I know) being bitchy about them, and it was partly thanks to her that I went to her agent, Giles Gordon.

Fay had a light, infectious laugh that made her sound much younger and more carefree than was the case. I learned that she suffered from a recurring illness which meant she was quite often taken off to A&E, but she was never self-pitying or glum.

She was intensely feminine, and always took care to dress stylishly, to have her hair done and wear makeup at a time when this was somewhat frowned on. Her feminism was real, but she had a pragmatic view of relations between the sexes which occasionally caused offence. She thought, as an LSE graduate, that women being paid the same as men had made everyone’s lives more miserable – “it meant that men were paid less and could no longer support them on one salary, so now everyone has to work whether they want to or not”. Ironically, she was the breadwinner herself for most of her life.

Her novels ranged from social satire to fantastical science fiction, but I know that the one she was proudest of was The Hearts and Lives of Men, in which a warring couple lose a child, they think, in a plane crash, only to find each other again. She always hoped for the best while fearing the worst – in relationships, in work, in politics.

Fay was kind, and honest, and brave – not just about her own life, and the choices she had made, but in sticking up for other women, too.

Chief books writer at the Guardian

Weldon published more than 30 novels, not to mention countless plays, anthologies, an autobiography, and radio and television series (the first episode of Upstairs Downstairs in 1971). But it is for her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil – adapted into a hit TV mini-series in 1986 and a film starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep in 1989 – for which she will be best remembered.

Weldon’s own life, as has often been pointed out, was as colourful as many novels. She was married three times, writing two “divorce novels”; symbolically burning down her ex-husband Ron Weldon’s house in Worst Fears (Weldon died as their divorce became final). She herself had a near-death experience after an allergic reaction in hospital – the pearly gates were “rather garish”, she reported – and she was baptised at 70.

She told Desert Island Discs that she was a psychic. “It’s what writers do,” she said. “Knowing what goes on in other people’s heads is normal for a novelist. I know what other people are thinking. Most people only hear what they are saying.” Weldon occupied a larger-than-life place in late 20th-century culture.

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 a year later I found myself working for the property dealers next door to the house she shared with her husband Nick. I wrote her a note and she phoned the office straight away, inviting me for the first in a summer of lunches. There was a study, lined with her books, and she gave me all of them, and then the new ones as they came out, almost every year.

The novels, as I read them then and have reread since, opened up a world of put-upon, often unattractive women, neglected and sometimes abused by men, who find ways to retaliate with fury, seduction and devilry. They are tales of the horrors and delights of domestic life in the suburbs and countryside, of vol-au-vents thrown to the floor in rage, of tears shed in cooking pots that can just as easily be bubbling up a witches’ brew as a family hotpot. Her first, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967, a few years after Doris Lessing and Mary McCarthy had made women’s bodily lives the subject of fiction with new zest and detail. Fay Weldon followed suit, writing about women’s appetites, and about our experiences of sex and pregnancy and childbirth. In her 1980 novel Puffball, the sheer alien craziness of pregnancy sparks a story where the life of the womb takes on more agency than the life of the people surrounding it.

When I first read those novels, I saw myself as a feminist reading feminist classics. I hadn’t expected them to be so funny, or so full of women’s desire and need for men. Weldon, in the 1960s, insisted in Technicolor, zippy prose that women needed more fulfilling lives, that femininity was dangerously defined by appearance, that men needed to take more responsibility for the raising of the next generation. By the time I was reading her, these views had become mainstream and readers were becoming troubled by how old-fashioned the feelings pulsing through these women were. “Hate obsesses and transforms me,” Ruth says in The Life and Loves of a She Devil, “it is my singular attribution”. There’s strength here, but it’s strength ignited by her love of her husband.

This was, I see now, a provocative lesson in understanding how often our feelings are at odds with our views. Fay’s particular bravery was her preparedness to acknowledge this. She’s remembered now for the more outrageous of her pronouncements. I was shocked when, emerging from university, Fay told me that I needed to find a boyfriend who was taller, older, richer and cleverer than I was, so that I could respect him. I didn’t agree, and I could feel the strain of her insisting to herself on her husband’s superiority in her own marriage. But her words came back to me when I found myself marrying a man with many of those attributes, and I couldn’t quite dismiss them. As I got older I saw that I too had feelings that didn’t fit easily with my views. I think that Fay showed me the value of opening myself to ambivalence and contradiction and seeing these as a source of revelation.

I last saw her last summer, in a nursing home in a suburb of Northampton which could have been the setting for one of her novels. She could no longer write, or speak clearly; I don’t think this was a stage of life she’d have been sorry not to prolong. But she still wanted to exchange gossip and she still wanted to be read. I wanted then to find a way to spark a revival in reading her novels, and am sad that it’s her death that is making that happen. But her books are there, ready for a new generation to take in their contradictions, their outrageousness, their sharp, skewering prose. She was a workaholic and a glamour puss, a hedonist and a moralist, a crowd-pleaser and an aesthete, a prankster with a deeply serious take on women’s lives. We need all that now, and, from Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch to Lara Williams’ Supper Club, there are plenty of young contemporary novelists writing new she devils into being, plenty waiting to take the energy from the earth and to use it as fuel for rage as Fay Weldon’s does:

In the end I sucked energy out of the earth. I went into the garden and turned the soil with a fork, and power moved into my toes and up my stubborn calves and rested in my she devil loins: an urge and an irritation. It said there must now be an end to waiting: the time for action had come.

Novelist and critic

The first time that I met Fay Weldon I was 13. She had left her husband, Ron, and I was witnessing the tenancy agreement between Fay and my mother to rent our basement in Primrose Hill.

I had never met a female novelist before, and Fay did not look at all like my childish conception of one. She was plump and pretty and teasingly jolly, and she gave us a copy of one of her novels, Down Among the Women (which she inscribed to my mother and “the landlady’s daughter”). We were not as flattered by this as we should have been, and soon after Fay became successful enough to be interviewed by the Guardian, complaining about her rental’s “thick saucepans and thin sheets”, or perhaps the other way around. At any rate, my mother took umbrage.

I, however, liked her. She was proud of her success as an advertising copywriter – which influenced my own decision to try advertising in turn – but never full of herself. A decade later, when I returned to live in a different rented basement in the same street, we met again. I was very surprised that she remembered me, given how few people take any notice of teenagers, but she did – and even apologised for her comments in that interview. We became friendly, despite the 30-year age gap. She was astute about other people in the literary world without ever (as far as I know) being bitchy about them, and it was partly thanks to her that I went to her agent, Giles Gordon.

Fay had a light, infectious laugh that made her sound much younger and more carefree than was the case. I learned that she suffered from a recurring illness which meant she was quite often taken off to A&E, but she was never self-pitying or glum.

She was intensely feminine, and always took care to dress stylishly, to have her hair done and wear makeup at a time when this was somewhat frowned on. Her feminism was real, but she had a pragmatic view of relations between the sexes which occasionally caused offence. She thought, as an LSE graduate, that women being paid the same as men had made everyone’s lives more miserable – “it meant that men were paid less and could no longer support them on one salary, so now everyone has to work whether they want to or not”. Ironically, she was the breadwinner herself for most of her life.

Her novels ranged from social satire to fantastical science fiction, but I know that the one she was proudest of was The Hearts and Lives of Men, in which a warring couple lose a child, they think, in a plane crash, only to find each other again. She always hoped for the best while fearing the worst – in relationships, in work, in politics.

Fay was kind, and honest, and brave – not just about her own life, and the choices she had made, but in sticking up for other women, too.

Chief books writer at the Guardian

Weldon published more than 30 novels, not to mention countless plays, anthologies, an autobiography, and radio and television series (the first episode of Upstairs Downstairs in 1971). But it is for her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil – adapted into a hit TV mini-series in 1986 and a film starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep in 1989 – for which she will be best remembered.

Weldon’s own life, as has often been pointed out, was as colourful as many novels. She was married three times, writing two “divorce novels”; symbolically burning down her ex-husband Ron Weldon’s house in Worst Fears (Weldon died as their divorce became final). She herself had a near-death experience after an allergic reaction in hospital – the pearly gates were “rather garish”, she reported – and she was baptised at 70.

She told Desert Island Discs that she was a psychic. “It’s what writers do,” she said. “Knowing what goes on in other people’s heads is normal for a novelist. I know what other people are thinking. Most people only hear what they are saying.” Weldon occupied a larger-than-life place in late 20th-century culture.