SOURCE: "Stories and a Novel," in New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1981, pp. 8-9.

In the following review, DeMott offers praise for Weldon's collection of short stories in Watching Me, Watching You, but notes her evolution from overly depressing subjects in her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, to less bleak resolutions in later works.

American admirers of Fay Weldon, the English playwright, novelist and short story writer, will especially welcome Watching Me, Watching You because it contains, in addition to 11 short stories, a reissue of her out-of-print first book, a novel that appears under its original English title The Fat Woman's Joke. Here and there in the short stories Miss Weldon offers wry versions of yesterday's feelings. (During the Battle of Britain, a wife remembers, "quite a lot of women claimed that air-raids were preferable to their husbands' attentions.") In one or two pieces ghosts walk, breaking...