From the acclaimed author of Miss Burma, longlisted for the National Book Award and the Women’s Prize, comes a tense and thought-provoking exploration of an intellectual affair and its reverberations across the lives of two couples.
Tessa is a successful white woman writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar based in Los Angeles. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more—but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship.
While Tessa’s husband, Milton, enjoys Charlie’s company on his visits to the East Coast, Charlie’s mixed-race Asian wife, Wah, is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah’s traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet, once homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to Tessa’s martini-fueled declaration that Wah is “an insult to womankind.” As Tessa is forced to deal with the consequences of her outburst and considers how much she is limited by her own perceptions, she wonders if Wah is really as weak as she has seemed, or if she might have a different kind of strength altogether.
An exercise in empathy, an exploration of betrayal, and a charged story of the thrill of a shared connection—and the perils of feminine rivalry—My Nemesis is a brilliantly dramatic and captivating story from a hugely talented writer whose portrayals are always gracefully phrased and keenly observed.
Charmaine Craig is the author of three novels, including Miss Burma, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is a former actor in film and television, and, as the descendant of significant figures in Burma’s modern history, she is a Burma activist privy to negotiations at the highest level in the current conflict. She studied literature at Harvard and received her MFA degree from the University of California, Irvine. She is a faculty member in the department of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.View all by Charmaine Craig
