Cut and Thirst by Margaret Atwood
Three women scheme to avenge an old friend in a darkly witty short story about loyalty, ambition, and delicious retribution by Margaret Atwood, the #1 bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Myrna, Leonie, and Chrissy meet every Thursday to sample fine cheeses, to reminisce about their former lives as professors, and lately, to muse about murder. Decades ago, a vicious cabal of male poets contrived—quite publicly and successfully—to undermine the writing career, confidence, and health of their dear friend Fern. Now, after Fern has taken a turn for the worse, her three old friends decide that it’s finally time to strike back—in secret, of course, since Fern is far too gentle to approve of a vendetta. All they need is a plan with suitably Shakespearean drama. But as sweet and satisfying as revenge can be, it’s not always so cut and dried.
About Author
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid’s Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood’s dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood’s work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers’ Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.
Recap
I think this line of the book description “Three women scheme to avenge an old friend” pretty much sums it up
Notes
5%
“Nostalgia is your enemy,”
6%
Myrna, a diet cola because she can’t permit any brain fog during these gatherings, she’d let the others talk her into things, such as murdering eight men, or is it nine?
7%
Too tired, Myrna glosses, chemo does that.
10%the constant allusions to her impending mortality are frazzling to Myrna’s nerves.
13%
adorableness is such a temptation.
14%
She has noticed, not without muted alarm, that she herself has shrunk half an inch over the past few years, but her feet have grown an entire shoe size. What next, furry ears?15%
“We want them to feel the hoofbeats of doom approaching. They should be made to suffer from the terror of anticipation.”
17%
Her one published book was about airborne women: women who managed to resist the pull of gravity, like—some might say—Chrissy herself. She has never been fully grounded.
20%
eight, or is it nine,
32%
The attackers, the eight, or was it nine,
42%
had a notoriously short fuse, a brick-thick shoulder chip, and a long memory for slights, real or imagined.
46%
(Humphrey had come from England. Where else? Who on this side of the Atlantic would have had parents pretentious enough to name a defenseless baby Humphrey?
46%
eight others, or was it nine,
62%
They reject electrocution with a radio in the bathtub (too difficult to stage, for how would they get into the dicky Stephen’s bathroom?) and hit-and-run with Leonie’s car (too many potential witnesses). Guns are out: they lack shooting experience, plus there are the incipient eye problems—a cataract here, an astigmatism there; they might blow out a streetlight or hit an innocent bystander. Mixing some high-powered sleeping pills into The Humph’s allegedly copious whiskey supply would surely involve a break-in, way too athletic. Toxic mushrooms—how would they insinuate such mushrooms into the …more
63%
Their respect for murderers is increasing: not so easy, this murdering business.
72%
Rumor has it he took a business degree and became a consultant, but maybe that was the other Stephen.
72%
Chrissy and her third husband, or was it her fourth,
75%
because the internet leaks like a sieve,
77%
She felt like an exile, stuck in a foreign country with no way to get back to a place where she’d been comfortable.
Review
It took me two weeks to read this story story, I guess that says a lot.
“Three women scheme to avenge an old friend in a darkly witty short story about loyalty, ambition, and delicious retribution”… I didn’t find it delicious, except when the three ladies were confused “was it fouth…” or “was it nine?”. It is darkly witty as it promises but seems to have missed the point.
I found this story odd, confusing, abrupt and…honestly aunnecessary. I loved some of the lines, though. It’s very funny in parts; I just didn’t understand the arc of it.
Final Take
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Shabana Mukhtar