cover image WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

Daisy de Villeneuve, . . Chronicle, $12.95 (90pp) ISBN 978-0-8118-4724-7

De Villeneuve devotes this short, diary-like work to a group of women who share one trait. They are "all the same type: bitch." In an angry, not-part-of-the-clique seventh-grade girl narrative style, the author chronicles her pain and suffering. Women are mean to her. They steal her men. They act friendly, but stab her in the back. They wear her clothes and use her makeup. Yet de Villeneuve, a British writer whose mother is a model and father is a photographer, insists on maintaining contact with the very people who undermine her sanity. Feeling guilty and unable to part from these toxic friends, she sees a therapist who advises, "It may help to edit some people out of your life." Alas, de Villeneuve doesn't take his advice. This work, a 5"×7" book typed on a 1947 Olympia, is largely a catalogue of insults. Although the affronts are augmented by de Villeneuve's colorful, linear, felt-tip drawings of punkish women with purple and turquoise hair and hot pink lipstick, in the end, the book isn't much more than a tool for revenge. Meow! (May 4)