Fag Hag

by Robert Rodi

Book Overview

Natalie loves Peter, a commercial artist who is on the prowl for his Mr Right. Peter loves women as well as men, and to Natalie's dismay, Peter sees her more as sidekick than siren. Natalie has managed secretly to poison all Peter's romances by drawing out the nightmare side of each new dreamboat.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452269407
• ISBN13: 9780452269408
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Plume Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Rodi's Best Dark Comedy

"Fag Hag" starts as a comedy and then slowly gets darker and darker - an innocent reader may miss the early signs that something is in the air. It is a story of not-too-beautiful girl Natalie who fell for her gay friend Peter and at least superficially decided to let her laugh turn into friendship. Yet deep inside she is still in love and will do anything to stay with the man she loves. We may laugh at Natalie when she successfully chases away potential candidates for her gay friend's significant other. Rodi very skillfully thickens the atmosphere, what seemed innocent at the beginning will come back to grow to completely unexpected dimensions. Fortunately, the tragic dimension never develops into a real tragedy, when Natalie decides that there are no holds barred in her attempts at keeping Peter forever by her side against his will, she will be stopped on time. Rodi combines his comic literary skills with psychological depth of analysis achieving almost eerily true picture of a friendship between a gay man and a straight woman gone terribly wrong. Fag Hag is simply a must read for gay men and their straight female friends because it delineates in detail all the dangers of such relationships. You will be laughing at the characters antics but don't forget to give a moment of thought to how similar their behaviour may be to yours and where you are heading if in a similar situation.

One of the first and still one of the best

I read this book years ago. Just when I was starting to get tired of the overly P.C. humorless writings that the gay community was being subjected to. This book was a godsend both then and now. It could be a Psychological essay on the type of girls who become fixated on gay men used in classes at Ivy League schools if it wasn't so damn funny.Natalie loves Peter, She loves hanging out with him, going to clubs, watching movies, and she knows if she can keep breaking up his relationships by subtle sabotage he will one day realize that all of those men can't make him happy, only she can. Read on while she slips farther and farther from reality, especially when Peter meets perhaps the "one". I've enjoyed all of Mr. Rodi's books but for character depth, humor, and re-readability this one is still my favorite.

This should be a Lifetime Movie

With all the melodrama in this book, it would make a perfect film for Lifetime! Imagine a tinge of Fatal Attraction, only without the precursory affair between the two leads. It was almost frightening to read, since you can imagine people in the real-world who are just like Natalie. Not a good book to give a potential stalker! :-) Definitely worth the read!

Wonderful, over-the-top satire

Robert Rodi has been compared to Armistead Maupin (author of "Tales of the City") and the comparison sure is apt with "Fag Hag." Like Maupin, Rodi has an eye for detail, which he uses to skewer and satire the good and bad of contemporary urban gay life. And Rodi (like Maupin) also has compassion for even his unsavory characters. In this book, Natalie (think Natalie on "The Facts of Life" for a rough mental image) is the classic "fag hag" in love with her best pal: a gay man, Peter, who will never be able to return her secret desire. A manipulative woman on a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford scale, Natalie resorts to more and more desparate measures to snare her man, or at least keep him for herself. But her work becomes more challenging when Peter falls in love with Lloyd, a libertaarian intellectual "survivalist." One of the funniest scenes in the book occurs when Lloyd turns his rational, Socratic conversational approach on a bitter, wisecracking queeny gay man, who has no idea how to respond.... I was a little disappointed by the ending, but otherwise this is an enjoyable, funny read. Gay male readers (and the women who love them) will get the most out of this book, but most anyone with a sense of humor should be able to appreciate the (decidely politically incorrect) satire here.