She May Not Leave [Kindle Edition]

Fay Weldon (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wary '80s feminism observer Weldon (The Fat Woman's Joke) turns her sharp eye to the desperate neediness of two-career London parents seeking child care. Early 30-ish Hattie, a literary-rights agent, and lefty journalist Martyn are partners, rather than husband and wife. For their infant, Kitty, they procure competent young Pole Agnieszka Wyszynska who effects a glorious, unprecedented order in their household, thus allowing Hattie to return to work and the couple to enjoy real food and sex once in a while. It's Hattie's grandmother, Frances, however, who narrates, and Frances suspects Agnieszka isn't quite what she seems. If the au pair really is Ukrainian rather than Polish, she's not an EU cardholder and thus not legal to work. The solution of having Martyn marry Agnieszka makes Frances, who has emerged from the swinging '60s bearing her share of battle scars, raise her eyebrows. Weldon also adds great aunt Serena, a successful novelist, to the chorus; she has her own child-rearing, marriage and career stories. The results hit very close to the working literary family's bone. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The acerbic Weldon aims some well-honed barbs at political correctness in this amusing send-up of modern relationships and child-rearing practices. In their mid-thirties--handsome, healthy, and well educated--literary agent Hattie and crusading journalist Martyn have been thrown off their game by the arrival of their infant daughter. While on maternity leave, Hattie feels particularly oppressed by the domestic routine: she's rotten at ironing, can't seem to soothe her baby, and hasn't worn an unstained garment in weeks. She suggests they hire an au pair, but Martyn has serious qualms about the ethics of having a servant. However, once Martyn experiences the calming effect the Polish nanny has on his household--which allows him to sleep late and eat gourmet meals, not to mention witness demonstrations of her belly-dancing lessons--his political principles crumble, but so does his relationship with Hattie. Narrating the whole turn of events is Hattie's 72-year-old grandmother, Frances, a character who allows Weldon to describe the changing attitudes toward children and marriage over four generations as well as to incorporate many autobiographical details that will be familiar to readers of her memoirs ( Auto da Fay, 2003). Throwing in one final unexpected but delicious twist at the end, Weldon delivers another of her trademark takes on the domestic wars. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1673 KB
• Publisher: Grove Press (September 5, 2005)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B001KYF1NG
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #422,193 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Listen on CD!, May 6, 2011

By 

Andrea Elise (Santa Monica, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: She May Not Leave (Paperback)

If you listen on CD, the narrator is amazing! She was also the narrator of the "spa" book. VERY talented! I think Fay Weldon is a tremendously talented writer, and having someone narrate her writing who has such a perfect delivery is pure pleasure. I almost cried when it ended.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars much better than expected, October 15, 2007

By 

Leeandra Nolting (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: She May Not Leave (Paperback)

I got this book by accident--I was on vacation in England and grabbed some British women's magazine off the rack in the gas station, thinking I would have a little mindless reading for the train ride. Well, in England a lot of magazines include free gifts, and this book was shrink-wrapped to it.

I expected this to be a silly romance novel, on the level of the ones Cosmopolitan prints excerpts from. I had never heard of Fay Weldon. So I was quite surprised to find a very, very darkly humorous and well-written novel.

The key is that NONE of the characters in this are sentimentalized at all. While Martyn and Hattie and Frances et. al. really do love each other, they are predominantly self-interested. Martyn is more concerned with the future of his political journalism career than with his partner's slow breakdown, Hattie is more concerned about being able to go back to work than with the obvious play Agnieszka is making for her common-law husband and child, Agnieszka is more concerned about getting to stay in England than by the damage this could cause Kitty in the long run, and even Baby Kitty, Weldon points out, loves best the person who attends to her needs the most.

That said, because the characters are so unlikeable (or very uncomfortably likeable), it's a hard novel to get into. Many people will be put off by the rather cavalier way mothers in three generations of this family leave their young children in the primary care of others. The mothers, simply put, aren't "motherly."

As to the people who claimed that the ending was a cop-out...uh, didn't you read the very beginning of the book? It was building all along...

5.0 out of 5 stars Romantic/domestic "comedy" that weaves another tale altogether, August 21, 2011

By 

Coffeechick (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: She May Not Leave (Paperback)

Fay Weldon is something of an aquired taste. Words like "ascerbic" and "brisk" have been used about her, and those are accurate. I think Weldon annoys quite a few who read her. She annoyed me considerably when I first read her years ago. Then I realized that Weldon aggravates by not writing what we expect--she doesn't write to make us happy, but to tell the truth. Weldon's choice of subject matter is the eternal love/war between the genders, and, just as importantly, how families create the main characters whose lives we follow. In Weldon's world, men and women put up with a great deal from each other, until the day a crack in the relationship becomes a fissure, and life goes on, but in a far more confusing and unanchored fashion.

"She May Not Leave" is about a young professional couple who hire a nanny/housekeeper, and realize how dependent on her they become. They go to ludicrous lengths to keep the talented Agniewska, telling themselves they'll never find another like her. But woven into Hattie and Martyn's story is a meta-story, a story of a family of women going back generations who just can't mother very well or very long. The relationships between mothers and daughters are distant, or outright dysfunctional, but grandmothers and granddaughters get along and support and love each other. The story of this unusual matriarchy is as interesting as the surface "main story." The denouement comes as a surprise to the reader, even though the reader realizes, later, that there was a family history hinting at what might come...

As well as delineating male/female relationships and familial relationships, Weldon has many telling observations about current English/Western culture and mores. Yes, she's "ascerbic," but it's gratifying to read truly adult fiction--a bit wounding, a bit harsh, but overall truthful, and with gleams of humor along the way.