is vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK. Julie grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the University of Reading, where she is now an associate lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Berkshire in the United Kingdom.
Cohen applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Eat, Slay, Love, and reported the following:
On page 69 of Eat, Slay, Love, one of my novel’s three protagonists, Marina, is talking with her ex-husband, Jake, who abandoned her and their three very young children for a younger woman. Jake has turned up unexpectedly to take the kids for the weekend. (This extract is very slightly edited.)Visit Julie Mae Cohen's website.Jake asked, "What will you do all weekend when I’ve got the rugrats?"Thematically, page 69 of Eat, Slay, Love is spot-on for the entire novel. The story is about three women who have been treated badly by men or the patriarchy in various ways, and about how they make friends with each other and find their own strength and power. Because Eat, Slay, Love is a funny thriller, they happen to find their own strength and power through kidnapping and murdering a man who’s preyed on all of them. That man isn’t Jake*, but in this passage, Jake is an example of some of the ways that men take advantage of women in our society, particularly when it comes to child-rearing.
Marina was so startled that he’d asked her an actual question about herself that she answered honestly.
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. Maybe I’ll read a book and do some gardening?”
Jake snorted.
“I don’t know what’s happened to you, Marina. You used to be such a fun girl. So easygoing and carefree. You’ve changed so much. Freya reminds me of the way you used to be, actually. It was one of the things that made me notice her.”
Ewan’s diaper bag was heavy, full of wipes and bottles and cans of follow-on milk. If she “accidentally” swung it at Jake’s crotch, she could hit him hard enough to hurt, maybe hard enough so that he couldn’t fuck his new girlfriend, but not so hard that he dropped the baby he was holding.
Instead she smiled and said, “Have a great weekend!”
Jake hasn’t been a hands-on dad, and he’s abandoned his kids, leaving Marina with three children under the age of five to look after on her own. He’s also lost all of the family’s money through bad investments. He’s a terrible father and husband—while Marina put her own career on hold in order to look after the house and their family. But he still blames Marina for the breakdown of their marriage, because she’s no longer a ‘fun girl’. As if it’s easy to be carefree when you’ve been breastfeeding and changing diapers constantly for nearly five years, with no help.
Marina has been suppressing violent urges, like the urge to slam the diaper bag into Jake’s crotch…but she’s not a naturally violent person. She’s just angry at how she’s been devalued by the world, and she’s not allowed to express it. She won’t realise exactly how angry she is until she meets Lilah and Opal, the other two protagonists of Eat, Slay, Love, and their friendship allows her to be her truest self.
Not all the men in the book are horrible, by the way. The novel is a humorous and bloody examination of how some men control, coerce, abuse, and dismiss women, and how women can take their revenge. But some of the men in the book are kind and loving and thoughtful—and it’s part of my protagonists’ journey to recognise the difference between a good man and a bad one, and make wise choices about relationships.
It’s just a shame that on the way, one or two of their bad choices have to be murdered, dismembered and disposed of where no one will find them.
*Jake doesn’t die, but he does get his own comeuppance. Some readers have told me that’s their favourite part of the book.
The Page 69 Test: Bad Men.
Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen.
--Marshal Zeringue
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