Four thirty-something Sydney women form a close circle of friends: Helen is a feminist academic, Philippa is writing a novel, Chantal edits a fashion magazine, and Julia is a freelance photographer. Making fun of both cliches about single women and conventions for erotica, Eat Me follows their love lives and the stories they tell one another about them: Helen's surreal fantasy about finding Rambo washed up on Manly beach, her analytical letter describing a rough quickie with a truckie right under the Big Merino at Goulburn, and her affair with a student; excerpts from Philippa's novel (with the title Eat Me), including an opening chapter describing debauchery in a supermarket; Julia's affairs with young men and her "one-morning stand" with a Beijing snake-charmer during a trip to China; and Chantal's story about hiring an agency escort and memories of a relationship with a poet a decade ago.

Reality is not easy to separate from fantasy or fiction in all of this — and Eat Me turns out to be a novel within another novel, with postmodern narrative games all around. Partly as a result of this, neither the characters or their relationships are really developed, and in the end Eat Me is more a series of comic erotic vignettes than a novel. If slight, however, it is also fun, a pleasant afternoon's entertainment.

May 2002

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