The novelist Fay Weldon, who has died aged 91, was to an unusual extent the creation of her own extravagant imagination. A polemicist whose opinions shaped themselves around the plot of her latest book, a pragmatist who giggled her way through every sentence, she was mischievous and evasive, yet wilfully and wittily life-affirming. “I long for a day of judgment when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear,” she wrote in her rackety 2002 autobiography, Auto da Fay. “We take to fiction, I suppose, because no such thing is going to happen, and at least on the printed page we can observe beginnings, middles and ends and can find where morality resides.”
With these lines, Weldon gave a big wink to her future obituarists: catch me if you can, she appears to be saying – there is nothing you can write about me that I have not written about myself, and it is the storyteller who is in command of the meaning of events, insofar as there is one.
