Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon, CBE, FRSL (born Franklin Birkinshaw; 22 September 1931 – 4 January 2023) was an English novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. An American movie adaptation of her novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil was filmed as She-Devil.

Quotes

Go to work on an egg.
- Advertising slogan originated by the Mather & Crowther agency for the British Egg Marketing Board, and used from 1957. [1]
- Fay Weldon wrote to Nigel Rees in 1981: "I was certainly in charge of copy [at Mather & Crowther] at the time…Who invented it, it would be hard to say. It is perfectly possible, indeed probable, that I put those six particular words together in that particular order but I would not swear to it." (The "Quote…Unquote" Newsletter, July 1992, p. 2).

Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.
- Down Among the Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1971] 1973) p. 172.

The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself…They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.
- Praxis (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978) p. 9.

I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?
- The Heart of the Country (1987)

Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you’re not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.
- The Independent on Sunday (5 May 1991).

Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on.
- "'Only one way out of here'" The Guardian (28 October 2006).

I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?
- "This much I know: Fay Weldon", The Observer Magazine (30 August 2009).

One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.
- "This much I know: Fay Weldon", The Observer Magazine (30 August 2009).

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.
- Life Force (1992), cited in Kakutani, Michiko (7 February 1992). "Books of The Times; Fallout From a Multitude of Liaisons". The New York Times. Retrieved on 12 February 2020.

[Published shortly after Weldon died in January 2023] Twenty years ago, I was dispatched to interview Weldon at home in Hampstead, north London. Her then husband, Nick, answered the door and immediately began a brutal interrogation. My name sounded familiar. Hadn't I given Fay's novel The Bulgari Connection, a book controversially sponsored by the Italian jeweller, a stinking review? Uh oh. But I wasn’t about to confess: I had a job to do. Was it definitely me he was thinking of? And was the review really a stinker? Maybe marital loyalty had made it seem worse than it was.
The interview began. Fay and I were getting along just fine when the door burst open. In strode her husband, in his hand a copy of the dreaded review, extracts from which he proceeded to read aloud as my entire body turned crimson (though I have to admit – icy chip and all that – I was also thinking what a good anecdote this would make later). As for Fay, a woman who understood revenge, she was enjoying herself mightily. "She's very hard, isn’t she?" she said to Nick, smiling like a goblin. "She's very difficult. She probably didn't like it because it didn't have any sex in it." And then: "Look, you've embarrassed the poor girl now." His work done, Nick left the room and we resumed, as if nothing had happened.
- Rachel Cooke "I learned the hard way that Fay Weldon was as sharp-witted as her characters" The Observer (7 January 2023)

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Fay Weldon