But some scenarios recur so frequently obsessively calling his answering machine and driving past his place, shredding his pictures or clothes, getting mutual friends to spy on him that it is hard to assume that they have been battle-tested. For the characters in the novels, writing is the best revenge. You get rich and famous writing about something you re already obsessed with. In Run Catch Kiss , Ariel Steiner takes revenge on the disgusting men she goes out with by lampooning them in her popular sex column. After her boyfriend dumps her, Jane Goodall, the protagonist in Animal Husbandry , turns to animal research for evidence on why men flee.
Bosses are likewise targets for revenge.
Revenge is psychologically expedient, but it does not accomplish lasting personal transformation, much less social change. This is all the more surprising because these books are about young women blessed by all the advantages that education, fond parents, and a good therapist can provide. Nevertheless, the challenge for these women is not to avoid, let alone alter, the bleak disjunctions of life but merely to survive them - to get over them and move on. In a world so blindly indifferent to individual merit and mettle a woman s chief psychological resource is humor, and her only form of activism is to laugh it off and get back in the game. Despite its resignation, this literature is hardly weary or despondent.