The Medusa Head

by Mary Meigs

For one year in her life, Mary Meigs and her long-term lover and friend, Marie-Claire Blais, lived in a ménage à trois with the beautiful and powerful “Andrée.” After the end of their stormy three-way relationship, both Marie-Claire and Andrée, who are fiction writers, embodied their memories in novels. The Medusa Head comes from the third woman—the autobiographer, who works hard to uncover the truth about that year. The story begins when Marie-Claire meets Andrée at a literary event in Paris. They fall in love; and when Mary meets Andrée, she falls in love, too. The three of them move to La Salle in Brittany, where Mary and Marie-Claire discover that the beguiling Andrée is emotionally complex. In her happy, contented state, Andrée is irresistible: intelligent, witty, charming. But Andrée is also given to sudden and unexpected mood shifts, the most terrifying of which is her transformation into the “Medusa Head”—a furious, irrational, overpowering figure who must be placated at all costs. Thus, Mary and Marie-Claire are drawn into Andrée’s emotional labyrinth, from which they find it increasingly difficult to escape.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983