Eating Cake

by Stella Duffy

Lisa has a loving husband, a lovely home and a successful career, but decides she needs more excitement. So she embarks on a passionate affair with her best friend's boyfriend, and finds fresh gratification in the arms of a woman. But then Lisa is burnt by the fire she thought she was playing with.

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Stella Duffy was born in London and grew up in New Zealand. She has lived and worked in London since the mid-1980s. She has written seventeen novels, over seventy short stories, and devised and/or written fourteen plays. The Room of Lost Things and State of Happiness were both longlisted for the Orange Prize, and she has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year. She has twice won the CWA Short Story Dagger. Stella is the co-founder of the Fun Palaces campaign for cultural democracy. Her latest novel is Lullaby Beach (Virago).
She is also a yoga teacher, teaching workshops in yoga for writing, and a trainee Existential Psychotherapist, her ongoing doctoral research is in the embodied experience of being postmenopausal.

Reviews

[Karen Wickham · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a depressing book. I had no sympathy or empathy with the main character, which isn't a good start. I already knew the subject of the story before I began reading, so the affairs weren't a surprise, but the main character, Lisa, isn't written very sympathetically at all. She seems to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I found the writing style quite irritating too. The prose is quite poetic in places, but there are an awful lot of long paragraphs talking about feelings, and less action and dialogue.

I do find it annoying when a story contains details that are illogical or badly thought out. In this case the annoyance was the fact that Lisa is supposed to work for a company that provides management training. You know the sort of thing. Take a group of executives out to a forest and tell them to climb over a tree with nothing but a rope and a tin can. Or take said group to an out of town conference centre and spend a week teaching them to communicate better with their staff. What didn't sit right with me is that in this company of 2 employees, we're told that Lisa does most of the training, and her boss, Mary, does most of the meeting of clients and bringing in new business. However, Lisa doesn't seem to spend much time giving training courses and seems able to take an hour or two off to meet her lover at the drop of a hat making an excuse that she's meeting a client. Meeting clients really isn't her job. Training courses, which we're led to believe make up the bulk of her workload, typically run to a timetable and you can't just decide to take a long lunch or leave early.

I wouldn't have written the same ending. I would have added a further plot twist, which I was sure was coming but didn't. The story just petered out really.

I won't be reading anything else by this author.

[Eleanor · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't get beyond the third or fourth page with this one. The main character, who's also the narrator, is so irritating. Not the sort of person I wanted to get to know any better.

[Helen Magee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something a bit different, can’t work out if I like or loath the main character!!!

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason this book had the NZ logo on the binding which means that it is written by a NZ author, so I picked it up because what are the chances I’ll find this book anywhere else in the world? But unfortunately this book had nothing to do with New Zealand, which was slightly disappointing. Girl is unhappily married and starts up an affair with her best friends long-term boyfriend. When the best friend announces she is pregnant, the Girl gets kind of depressed and starts up a relationship with a women who is a client to her company. The awesome twist to the story is that the boyfriend dies and the Girl can’t deal with it. She tells the other women about it and the women gets kind of pissed because she thought she was the only one that the Girl was cheating with. In the end, the only one that the Girl is left with is her husband. And no one ever finds out what happened. This book was better then I thought it would be and usually I hate people like this, go through life doing morally “bad” things that get no repercussion on it and then end up okay, but the way this book was written, it was just different and especially when the boyfriend died, you totally felt for the Girl.

Grade: C

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wicked - left me horny and rampant as a devil for 2 whole days. Tempting as a chocolate fresh cream eclair and as colourful and textured as a costume pary of first love, old love and new love all togerther. Full of familiar flavours and a unique way of uniting the way we think using strung together verbs and nouns rather than actual adjectives for descriptive value.

'I woke Andy with a long slow kiss that welcomed his morning desire and then chose to ignore it'. p. 4

'I was not made for wickedness...boredom, however is an excellent teacher and four years of marriage the ideal school'. p. 2

'Surrounding yourself with other apparentluy happy couples saves you the bother of looking at the cracks in your own relationship. You can have a far better time scrutinising the schisms in theirs'. P. 49

'Fortunately he was also just starting to develop the stomach that comes to men in their thirties when they've laughed at the rest of us and our paranoias for so long' p. 58

[Andrea Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisa is probably the least likeable protagonist I've ever come across. Married to Andy she embarks on a planned affair with her best friend's partner. Not satisfied with that she then starts a lesbian affair. She does have moments of conscience but seems to wave them away as they are not what she wants. Eventually it all comes crumbling down around her

[Kathryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This took me weeks to finish - I guess because I wasn't really enjoying it, but hate giving up on books! Wasn't to keen on the writers style, and won't look out for other books!

I have to say though - the ending took me by surprise!

[Mew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Annoying characters put me off