The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

Ruth is, by her own admission, an unlucky woman. Ungainly, unattractive, unassertive, she trudges through life bowed under the weight of a loveless marriage to a brazen, cheating, indifferent man named Bobbo. Although she has patiently suffered through the small and not-so-small indignities occasioned by sharing a life with the uncaring Bobbo, as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil opens, Ruth's patience is wearing thin, and the pain and resentment she has been swallowing all these years are finally beginning to bubble over.

This is a black comedy, but it is also—as black comedies tend to be-an exceedingly sad meditation on facing one's lot in life, and coming to grips with a capricious fate that lavishly rewards some while cruelly withholding from others. But more importantly, it is a scathing indictment of a society and a value system that reinforces, twenty times over, that basic, cosmic unfairness. Ruth's adversary is a petite blonde named Mary Fisher, a superficial and casually amoral woman whose chosen occupation is writing passionate, best-selling, romance novels about the nature of love. Mary has been born with everything-looks, proportions, hair, and an understanding of how best to negotiate with the world to get what she wants. Not only does the world pay constant tribute to her shallow attributes (her novels are best-sellers), but Ruth's own husband openly prefers her over his dutiful, but unglamorous wife.