My nemesis is a student at another university. She has not always been my nemesis. We were friends until I realised that she was not who she purported to be. Her interests had been systematically poached from the people around her. Talking to her always felt like an interrogation from a particularly insecure detective.
Real feminists know that empowerment comes from defining the breadth of your own animus
She mined me constantly for pointers on speed-reading and language-learning. Rarely did she actually follow my advice, especially when it required resourcefulness and hard graft. The final straw came when my nemesis inquired, out of nowhere, about my career plans. ‘Thanks,’ she said when she’d finally managed to file them down to a single job title. ‘I’ll look into that.’ Like Bette Davis’s character in All About Eve, I was being usurped by a grasping wannabe. ‘It sounds like you’re being ambiguously stalked,’ said a more trustworthy friend. I
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