Dorothy Weil
Dorothy Weil has published a comic novel bought by Disney Productions, a memoir, a collection of poetry, a YA novel, a critique of America’s first best-selling woman author, and hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers. Aside from the articles, which range from humor to art to a stolen race horse, her theme has been the lives of girls and women. She has written of the challenges women face at all ages: from adolescence to midlife, to old age. Dorothy is a graduate of the University of Chicago, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and holds a Ph.D from the University of Cincinnati. She has taught at Cincinnati and Edgecliff College, where she developed courses in Creative Writing and Women in Fiction. Dorothy is almost a native Cincinnatian, having lived there since the fifth grade after a peripatetic childhood living in places as diverse as a steamboat, a marina, and a swanky hotel. She paints when possible at a studio near her riverside home. |
A Good Woman
Synopsis: A Good Woman is the story of Mary Lou Friedman, a spunky eighty-five year old whose life slides into chaos when she is threatened by local hoodlums and her husband becomes terminally ill. As Mary Lou fights for her family and home, she revisits her past as a wild farm girl, a naïve young bride, an inexperienced mother, and a mature woman discovering her sexuality. Throughout, she copes with the changing expectations and challenges faced by women of the twentieth century, the final hurdle being old age in a world where people live long but receive little respect. Ultimately Mary Lou is stripped of everything she depends on. Vowing to defend her home, she acquires a gun, with tragic results. Older people are often overlooked in fiction, but as Mary Lou Friedman, protagonist of A Good Woman, says, "we are not spent cartridges lying on the ground after wars, but have all the feelings of dread and fear, of happiness and contentment as ever, along with a vast supply of memories." When Mary Lou and her husband Don find themselves "hostages" in their home, Mary Lou becomes the instrument of his death and is accused of murder. The prosecutor states, "this is murder pure and simple and will be prosecuted like any other case." While such deaths often occur, they are hardly "pure and simple" criminal acts. A Good Woman shows how such tragic events could come about.
|