W is for Fay Weldon

The Goodreads link

Fay Weldon first came to my attention when I was 12, and my mum was watching the BBC version The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which tells the story of one of the most extreme acts of revenge in literature. If you are unfamiliar with the story, an unattractive and downtrodden housewife embarks on a complete plastic-surgery reinvention of herself and procedes to irrevocably punish her ex-husband for the suffering he caused her. (Dennis Waterman played the husband - I am unsure whether he sang the theme tune :-))

Link to Goodreads

(Rosanne Barr made a version in 1989, if you're interested, called She-Devil.)

Years later, when I was 18, ITV adapted The Cloning of Joanna May. This time, an aggrieved man clones his ex-wife.

I've since read a couple of her novels, and marital relations play a big part in her work, particularly those relations which are no longer working, or no longer what they seem. On the whole, her writing is good, but what drew me to include her in this series (apart from the W in her name!) is the sheer scope of her ideas. Plastic surgery when it was still quite a bizarre thing to do; cloning when the idea of clones was first being mooted.

If nothing else, she is inspiration to keep an eye on the news and pick up on those tiny little 'and another thing...' snippets that appear at the bottom of the page, or the end of the new bulletins. You never know what you'll pick up on!