The Edible Woman

The Edible Woman is the first published novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, published in 1969.

Marian's life is consumer research, and that is the joke the book is built on: she spends her days asking people what they want and writing down their answers, and her friends, fiance and colleagues all seem to have been assembled from the same questionnaire. The novel follows her as her body and her sense of herself drift apart, and Atwood gives the process a physical form. Marian starts finding human qualities in the food she is served until she cannot bring herself to eat any of it, and what had been a comic portrait of a young woman being organised into a role becomes a study of refusal. In a foreword written for a later edition in 1979 Atwood described it as protofeminist rather than feminist, and the argument of the book fits that description: the characters who obey the conventions exactly, such as Peter and Lucy, and the ones who ignore them, such as Ainsley and Duncan, are all measured against each other. The narration shifts from first person to third and then back again, and the shift follows Marian's detachment and her return, and food and clothing carry most of the book's information about who people are.