Review: 'My Nemesis' by Charmaine Craig

There's really no going back from calling someone an insult to womankind and meaning it. But how do you even get there? And how do you actually move past it? My Nemesis tackles not just that, but presents an absolutely eviscerating take on ideas of womanhood. Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 2/7/2023
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Tessa is a successful 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 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 a martini-fueled declaration by Tessa 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.

Compassionate and thought-provoking, My Nemesis is a brilliant story of seduction, envy, and the ways we publicly define and privately deceive ourselves today.

One of the hardest lessons I learned when I became a Feminist is that many things are no longer fun once you've gained a new perspective. It became worse once my awareness became more intersectional and I realised I'm also part of the problem. The reason I'm starting with this is because Tessa felt like a walking advertisement about the way some Feminists turn into the worst kind of people. My Nemesis is as much a satire upon White Feminism, as it is an interrogation of the Memoir genre. Every other week, it seems, some memoir piece written for some magazine goes viral, with the life of someone laid bare to the reader. The reason these often go viral is because there is the distance between how aware the author thinks they are and how non-aware they are about how they come across. This distance in perception is something that comes across beautifully in My Nemesis with Tessa, who thinks so much of herself and betrays so much about how she actually is without seemingly meaning to. She is incredibly enticing as a narrator because from the beginning you know she's not a great person, but it's like a slow trainwreck, it's impossible to look away.

My Nemesis starts with the confrontation itself, with Tessa calling Wah an insult to womankind. This novel is almost Tessa's mea culpa, in which she at once tries to justify herself and yet also is trying really hard to be honest about how she got to where she got. So Tessa tells us about the beginnings of her friendship with Charlie, her own obsession with him, her failed first marriage, her tenuous second one, her strained relationship with her daughter, and her consistent nagging about Wah. We see how Tessa interprets Wah's actions, how she glosses over her own wrongdoings, and how she then backtracks and actually spills some truth about herself. We also find out what happened after the confrontation, as Tessa is writing it herself. This may feel like an odd way to summarise the novel, but that is because it honestly is hard to really encompass it. My Nemesis is a novel that interrogates feminism, race, class, motherhood, and womanhood, all through the lens of memoir and letter writing. Because we only get to see things through Tessa's eyes, we only get a limited view of the other characters. But we know that is what happening; we know we are being misled, perhaps unintentionally, so we can't get too lost in Tessa's own ideas.

My Nemesis was everywhere at the beginning of the year, in large part, it felt to me, because of the shocking beginning and premise. Charmaine Craig pulls no punches and shows Tessa, Charlie, Wah, and Milton from their worst angles, as well as from some kinder ones... sometimes. Tessa is the worst, but seeing what she got up to and how she tried to justify herself felt like a rush. Wah is such a cipher, with other characters constantly projecting things onto her, while she tries to take self-denial to the next level. There is also the fact that the novel plays with so many other themes. Race is a massive elephant in the room throughout the novel, addressed but never properly dealt with by Tessa. The stereotype of the submissive Asian woman is incredibly damaging and the way My Nemesis deals with it is very interesting. It does at times feel like Craig was taking too many things on board at once, which don't get as much attention or time to breathe as they should. There are so many extra details, side plots, and side characters which feel relevant but disappear too quickly. In a way that makes sense, because we're getting Tessa's perspective. But I did feel kind of left high and dry when My Nemesis ended. It was a whirlwind experience, however, and it did make me re-investigate some of my own biases and feminist attitudes. 

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

I still can't quite believe how gripped I was by My Nemesis. I was literally on edge throughout, at once hating Tessa, then understanding her, then wondering at Wah, and then feeling sorry for her. While there was a little too much going on, I did really like this novel and would wholeheartedly recommend it.