(1981)
I wrote The Edible Woman in the spring and summer of 1965, on empty examination booklets filched from the University of British Columbia, where I had been teaching freshman English for the previous eight months. The title scene dates from a year earlier; I’d thought it up while gazing, as I recall, at a confectioner’s display window full of marzipan pigs. It may have been a Woolworth’s window full of Mickey Mouse cakes, but in any case I’d been speculating for some time about symbolic cannibalism. Wedding cakes with sugar brides and grooms were at that time of particular interest to me. The Edible Woman, then, was conceived by a twenty-three-year-old, and written by a twenty-four-year-old, and its more self-indulgent grotesqueries are perhaps attributable to the youth of the author, though I would prefer to think that they derive instead from the society by which she found herself surrounded.
(The Edible Woman was not my first novel. The first one had been composed in a rentable broom closet in Toronto, but it had been rejected by all three of the then-existent Canadian publishers for being too gloomy. It ended with the heroine deciding whether or not to push the male protagonist off a roof, a conclusion that was well ahead of its time in 1963 and probably too indecisive now.)
I finished The Edible Woman in November of 1965 and sent it to a publisher who’d displayed some interest in my previous book. After an initial positive letter, I heard nothing. I was too busy worrying about my PhD Orals to follow up at that point, but after a year and a half I began probing and discovered that the publisher had lost the manuscript. By this time I was marginally visible, having won an award for poetry, so the publisher took me out to lunch. “We’ll publish your book,” he said, not looking me in the eye. “Have you read it?” I said. “No, but I’m going to,” he said. It was probably not the first book he’d published out of sheer embarrassment.
The Edible Woman appeared finally in 1969, four years after it was written and just in time to coincide with the rise of feminism in North America. Some immediately assumed that it was a product of the movement. I myself see the book as protofeminist rather than feminist: there was no women’s movement in sight when I was composing the book in 1965, and I’m not gifted with clairvoyance, though like many at the time I’d read Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir behind locked doors. It’s noteworthy that my heroine’s choices remain much the same at the end of the book as they are at the beginning: a career going nowhere, or marriage as an exit from it. But these were the options for a young woman, even a young educated woman, in Canada in the early sixties. It would be a mistake to assume that everything has changed. In fact, the tone of the book seems more contemporary now than it did in, say, 1971, when it was believed that society could change itself a good deal faster than presently appears likely. The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we’re living-in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.