Claire Bloom

Revenge songs are dime a dozen. Heck, one only needs to go through the oeuvre of Taylor Swift to get into double digits. Revenge novels? Well, that's a dish not often served.

And we don't mean revenge memoirs here; those are dime a dozen as well. For example, Claire Bloom's "Leaving a Doll's House", which talked at length about her awful marriage to Philip Roth. (Brilliant writer, but not exactly a brilliant human being.)

So what did Roth do? In response to Bloom's tell-all, he wrote "I Married a Communist", that rare revenge NOVEL. In the book, a thinly veiled stand-in of Bloom, Eve Frame, destroys a thinly veiled stand-in for Roth, Ira Ringold. There are too many parallels to real life to mention, but Eve is both Jewish (which Bloom is as well) and antisemitic (let's not go there).

In real life, Bloom was an esteemed actress, mostly on English stage but also on the screen, sharing the screen multiple times with then-beau Richard Burton and popping up stateside in two of Woody Allen's films. Also in real life, she is still kicking at the age of 94... while Roth has been dead for a while.

Perhaps that's the ultimate revenge.