The story opens in Terramoto, Italy, with the heroine Joan Foster looking back to her life after having staged a fake death. Joan Foster spends a tumultous childhood that lacked parental TLC and forced her into being fat. Her mother not only puts her down constantly, but also enables her fatness. When Joan finally starts getting thinner, her mother tries to seduce her back to being fat by trying to undermine her efforts. Joan has one person, her aunt, who gives her unconditional love.
Yet, when the aunt dies, she leaves Joan money with the condition that Joan lose 100 lbs. Joan moves out of the house away from her parents, loses the fat, gets the money, and flees to England where she finds a lover and a career, writing. Then she hooks up with her later-to-be husband Arthur, who is a frustrated manic-depressive revolutionary, a true cause-seeking highbrow.
Joan writes gothic novels on the sly with the pen-name Louisa K Delacourt, without Arthur's knowledge, but becomes an overnight literary success with another book "Lady Oracle" as Joan Foster. Interpreted by others as feminist poetry, the book being feminist, however, was unintented.
Unable to deal with her disfunctional marriage, her weird affair with a performance artist, and her fight with a celebrity-blackmailing reporter who blackmails her, Joan feigns her own suicide and flees to Italy, trying to start anew, incognito. But she bungles that up since she goes to a place where she had been before and people recognize her.
Eventually she realizes that, once famous, invisibility is impossible. So she decides to look forward to future rather than to her past.

any type of reading: for enjoyment, for its characters, for its twisted plot or subplots, or literary analysis.

everything about it, especially the insightful look into the warped mother-daughter relationship.

entertained and enlightened.

Margaret Atwood, a very important Canadian writer, was born in 1939 in Ottawa. After doing her master's in Radcliffe College, she became a treasure not only to Canada but to the entire world as a writer and teacher. Among her many works are: The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, Good Bones and Simple Murders, Morning in the Burned House (poetry).

this book, besides being introspective, funny, entertaining, dynamic, also impresses the reader along the way. The writer's, wit, poeticism, and use of the language -seemingly light but with a lot of depth- is extraordinary.

Although the ending seems abrupt or quickly wrapped, I believe this was necessary for the book's mission. Joan Foster's character was exquisitely developed through the story and her decision about her life at the end was the crowning touch. This is another remarkable book by a giant writer of all time.

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Created Sep 24, 2003 at 10:35am • Submit your own review...