Iris Owens - After Claude (epub)

Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it’s Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. To the contrary, she will stay and exact revenge—or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it’s easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives and hearts—until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.
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I haven’t read a more wittily offensive serious novel lately. There aren’t many literary heroines, among the practical types and crazy sisters looking for a place to live in this world, who transcend social and critical pieties in the overwhelming fact of themselves. Clarissa, Emma and Cathy are among the ancestors of Harriet.
—Leonard Michaels

One of the earliest portraits of the female antihero, a sort of distaff Notes From Underground. It was very funny.
—Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

Barbed, bitchy and hilariously sour.
—Kenneth Tynan

Harriet tells her story like a female Lenny Bruce. I was laughing too hard to see the page.
—John Lahr