SOURCE: "Contemporary Triangles," in Saturday Night, Vol. 97, No. 4, April, 1982, pp. 51-2.

A commentator on the arts, Wachtel has worked as a writer, broadcaster, and host of radio programs produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In addition, she has edited two works about domestic abuse against women and coauthored a study about the legal rights of women in Women and the Constitution (1991). In the following review of Real Mothers and Two in the Bush, and Other Stories, Wachtel perceives Thomas as a skilled recorder of the problems and dynamics of modern adult and family relationships.

For a while, it looked as if feminism had spawned so traumatic an awareness of the untenability of women's lives that they had to recoil from reality. Fictional heroines retreated into the neuroses of Margaret Laurence's The Fire-Dwellers, slipped into the madness of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, or delved into the elaborately crazed, supernatural world...