Watching Me, Watching You

by Fay Weldon

A distillation of our times: eleven short stories from this brilliant contemporary writer.

‘Watching Me, Watching You’ was Fay Weldon’s first collection of short stories. They vary widely in theme, while remaining avowedly feminist, sometimes bitter, sometimes angry, yet always handled with wit, irony and courage. A sense of sisterhood is one of the most important qualities a woman may possess and its loss, as in one particular story, ‘Alopecia’, can bring tragedy. On the other hand, in ‘Threnody’, a women’s commune can be gently mocked, and the failings of the leading characters are human rather than masculine.

Fay Weldon’s observation is always wonderfully acute and ‘Watching Me, Watching You’ is dominated throughout by her humour and intensity of purpose, giving to these stories a marvellous strength and unity.

CONTENTS
Christmas tree --
Breakages --
Alopecia --
Man with no eyes --
Holy stones --
Threnody --
Angel, all innocence --
Spirit of the house --
Watching me, watching you --
Geoffrey and the Eskimo child --
Weekend --
The fat woman's joke.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, British Literature, Literary Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Fay Weldon CBE was an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrayed contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of British society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Weldon

Reviews

[hawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

a collection of eleven short stories, first published in 1981.

the stories are sparsely but nicely sketched... with dynamic dialogue... and full of humour 🙂 cleverly crafted, and so many threads. the language really enjoyable alot of the time, in places poetic, wickedly witty and wry 😁

amongst common themes:
alot, if not all, of the stories feature gendered dynamics, within sexist norms. relationships and sexuality. class. psychological therapies. children and the politics, ethics and experiences of having children or not.

there was, perhaps as a result of the recurring themes, a little repetition amongst the stories, tho it was mostly occasional and kinda gave a linked quality to the diverse short stories 🙂


❗spoilers beyond this point ❗


🎄🌲 Christmas Tree
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 +
I liked the Christmas tree, dug up and replanted year after year.
theatre, class, family and relationships... north and south (England)...
ones own roots, like those of the Christmas tree 😉🙂

⛪🫖 Breakages
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 +
the wife of a vicar... marital discord... animate inanimate objects in the house! the perpetual fear of breaking something in the house.
"you shattered my life... "
then reconciliation 🙂

👗👠 Alopecia
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
changing times and receding fortunes in Hoxton.
Maureen and 'Mauromania' 😉
the health impacts of work and working environments.
the normalisation of domestic violence 😥😬
but, heheh, a brief reappearance the woman with the green pubic hair from story 1? 😉
drew in well so many other threads too, skillfully woven and/or stitched 🙂

🏘⛺ Man With No Eyes
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 +
family fortunes.
Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona. monopoly (game) as metaphor 😉🙂
horror (of dynamic/situation) handled with humour 🙂
rhythm in repetition 🙂

🪨🎚 Holy Stones
🌟 🌟 🌟 +
a man's musings on matrimony, mid-flight.
the couple in Israel, their different positions on religion.
excellent closing sentence:
"he, who had been prepared to worship a wife, had married a woman who worshipped strange gods instead of her husband" 😆😁

👥📖 Threnody
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
Threnody - dirge or lament. a narrative that we come to understand is a woman speaking to her therapist, recounting her childhood experiences (we deduce what the therapist says from her monologue). war time, a world of only women, her mother's relationship with Elsie next door... the end of the war, institutional education, rape... work, marriage, motherhood...
falling in love with Sheila, declaring her lesbianism 🙂
spans 1977-1980
a really interesting exploration, and rather tongue in cheek 😉

🎨👻 Angel Or Innocence
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 +
art school model become artists wife... pregnancy...
noises in the attic, and stories and speculation around them, punctuate the story. abit creepy. ghosts of herself in the attic? and/or the previous occupant.

🏛👶 Spirit Of The House
🌟 🌟 🌟 +
Jenny the nanny, in a stately home, opened to the (paying) public. Christine who works as part of that business, the only one with suspicions about Jenny, and her care for the baby.
nice commentary on the upper classes.

🏡👻 Watching Me Watching You
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
a ghost watching a couple moving into a house... charting the changes. looking into their futures.
a child from a previous relationship, coming and going, also observing the house and the couple too.
the ghosts of previous relationships. the ghosts of their future selves looking back 🙂

🤯👶 Geoffrey and the Eskimo Child
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
a young couple, Geoffrey and Tanya. work, home, family, fortunes. I laughed out loud when the possible side effects of vasectomy were raised. alot in the story including commentary on reproductive responsibility, and the burden falling on women. Geoffrey's concerns about the state of the world, but lack of awareness of the toll on his wife wrt his ethical/idealogical choices.
so much in this one to laugh out loud about 😃😁

🏡🥔 Weekend
🌟 🌟 🌟 +
Martin and Martha, middle class weekends in the country. family, friends.
'women's work', cycling and never ending.


🌟


accessed as an RNIB talking book, well read by Pauline Munro 🙂

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.06⭐

Christmas tree 3⭐
Breakages 5⭐
Alopecia 4.25⭐
Man with no eyes 3.25⭐
Holy stones 3.75⭐
Threnody 5⭐
Angel, all innocence 4.25⭐
Spirit of the house 3⭐
Watching me, watching you 4.25⭐
Geoffrey and the Eskimo child 4⭐
Weekend 5⭐
The fat woman's joke 4⭐

[Shawn]

I read one story in this, to knock it off my "to read" list. I also read 4 other stories, that appear here, in other collections so I've carried those reviews over to here. Weldon strikes me as an interesting writer of dark lit, or at least the stories I was directed to (as a reader of horror and the macabre) fall into that area (it may not be true of her fuller output) - writing in the 70s (at least the stories I read), fiercely feminist in a second-wave mode (although someone on Goodreads refers to her as an "anti-feminist feminist" which - without knowing details - just implies to me that she has the good sense to reject extremes and absolutes), and surprisingly able to note and trenchantly convey passive-aggression and what are no-called "micro-aggressions" (a term I'm not comfortable with as its moved beyond it initial definition into a broader, generalized pop-culture one, but still valid when used correctly). Weldon has a nicely light and breezy style, conversational and informal. None of these are "horror" stories in the traditional sense, although they do convey disturbing interpersonal relationships and petty cruelty.

"Geoffrey And The Eskimo Child" - Tania, and her thoughtful, forgiving, feminist, politically progressive husband, progress through their marriage as, despite fears of the world around them, they accrue a large family of children through adoption and accidental pregnancy, despite Tania's ultimate wishes. A strange, passive conté cruel.

"Angel, All Innocence" (which I read in Mischief: Fay Weldon Selects Her Best Short Stories)) Angel - in a conflicted and unfulfilling marriage with a petulant, controlling, cheating, immature Edward, who she hasn't yet told she is pregnant - hears noises in the attic, formerly an apartment occupied by a poverty-stricken mother with four children who was physically abused by her husband. Ruminations on her life and marriage, and a possible brief encounter with a ghost, inform her eventual decision on a course of action. A solid story, and a subtly ambiguous "ghost story" with slight resonances of "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

"Alopecia" (which I read in Mischief: Fay Weldon Selects Her Best Short Stories) - a group of female friends maneuver their way through the 60s and early 70s, running as fashion house/brand. But when one proves to be physically abused by her husband, they almost all turn a blind eye (as they stand to gain socially, financially or romantically by staying in the husband's good graces). While the men in this story (husbands, lovers) are generally awful or thoughtless, the real venom is reserved for the actions and statements of the women, who (almost all lacking any sense of "sisterhood") justify (sadly familiar) and cattily joke (the battered wife must have the titular condition, and not have had her hair torn out in chunks by her brute of a husband) about the wife-beating. Dark, almost enough to consider it a conté cruel.

"The Man With No Eyes" (which I read in Mischief: Fay Weldon Selects Her Best Short Stories) - with her dysfunctional (husband is an arrogant, controlling, passive-aggressive jerk) family on holiday, a wife meditates on why she stays with the wretch, musing on her own fatherless childhood and casting her suffering as sacrifice for her daughters' sake. Well done, with some nice drama (a storm and power failure during a game of monopoly, a fogbound hike around an ancient fort).

"Spirit Of The House" (which I read in Mistresses of the Dark: 25 Macabre Tales by Master Storytellers) has an employee at the grand home of one of those landed-gentry-turned-tourist-attraction manors begin to suspect that the young nanny - who her husband lusts after - entrusted with the care of the lord's infant child is actually harming the baby, but no one believes her. Nice little modern Gothic, set in the world of declined nobility, money and what passes for modern "manners" with some pointed things to say about class, privilege, the landed gentry and the public's obsession with them. Solid and effective.

[Richda Mcnutt · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I appreciate Faye Weldon's wit and perceptions, I found this to be unrelentingly ugly in tone regarding the male species. Yes, some are controlling (and some women are doormats), but very few of the males had any redeeming qualities whatsoever - and talk about passive-aggressive! My reaction was to also think less of the female characters for being such masochistic wimps. The three stars acknowledge her writing ability and that she could make me react so strongly to her characters, be they admirable or, more often, deserving to be throttled.

[barca_sevitova · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read the Alopecia story, because I had it for school. But it was really interesting.

[F · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of short stories was first published in book form in 1981. Not all the stories it contains had already been published, but some of the stories had first appeared in print from 1976 onwards. I think I find Fay Weldon's writing very dated now - very seventies. She is angry, her male/female relationships are either confrontational or depict stereotypical chauvinist men and oppressed women or characters who portray a position on the spectrum which stretches from 'unliberated' to 'liberated'. For example, in 'Christmas tree' the women with whom our hero has relationships seem to chosen in order to display some sort of typical attitude to male/female relationships. The only couple who might be someone you might meet in the street are his parents, about whom we know almost nothing.

[Nen Simmons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, and interesting characters, but found that each story ran on a similar theme, of unfulfilled woman whose husband did not understand her, and this got tiring by the end. You wondered why none of the women realised that their husbands weren't telepathic, and that they should share with them whatever was making them unhappy. This book was written in the 70s though, where there was a greater expectation that men and women would adopt different roles in a marriage, and accept it. For this reason, perhaps it hasn't aged well, and the female characters just feel a bit spineless.

[Peter Coomber · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you were to write the same short story eleven times, each time in a refreshing style and manner to make it seem like it was a different story, then this collection of stories is what you would get.
Most authors try to write stories that are different each time, but perhaps that is because they don't have the skill to make the same story sound different..?


Nov 2024: Not sure what I meant back then. I am beginning to enjoy these stories.