The title of one of Jill McCorkle's stories, "Sleeping Beauty: Revised," sums up the pattern of many of the stories in her Crash Diet collection, revisionist fairy tales I would compare to Anne Sexton's Transformation poems. McCorkle's protagonists overcome their losses (of husbands and lovers, usually by desertion and/or divorce, as in the stories I am going to discuss) with dignity, strength, and of course, a good sense of humor, and prepare to live alone for a while or for the rest of their lives. Although many of her protagonists suffer the loss of love due to a man's betrayal, and in spite of the negative depictions of most of the male characters, as pointed out by Jack Butler in his New York Times review of the collection (15), McCorkle makes very clear that her female protagonists play a significant role in their own victimization. They did, after all, choose the men who left them, many times against their own better instincts. A happy ending is then allowed for when the protagonist realizes that she is better off without the untrustworthy man. This recognition leaves the reader with a more substantial sense that the protagonist will live "happily" (probably not "ever after," but at least for the most part) than one can count on from the mysterious happily ever after that close traditional fairy tales.