Welcome to the first real entry of Don’t Fall For Weird Books! The way these entries will work is that there will be an introduction, then the discussion of the chosen book, followed by further recommendations and what you can expect next month. Ok, let’s get into it!
I’ve recently been intrigued by the relationship between women and consumption…actual, physical consumption. Eating things. Or not eating things. But the things I’m interested in women eating are weird. Inedible objects. Sunlight. Chalk. Blood. Human flesh. Hair. I’m interested in ruminations on women consuming things or deciding not to consume things, and how that relates to the body and the self. This dips into eating disorder territory but goes beyond it. It dips into cannibalism and vampirism but is not restricted by it. I’m imagining it being both loud and splashy, as well as subtle and small.
Women have a hugely complicated relationship to consumption (both physical and otherwise). It’s usually negative (eating disorders), and usually has rather obvious themes (cultural expectations, objectification, anxieties, trauma, etc.). I’m more interested in how consumption fulfills or changes the sense of self.
Why am I thinking about this? I don’t actually know. But I watched Fresh (2022) on Hulu when it came out and started thinking about certain acts in the movie, and also what the movie would have been like if the gender roles were reversed. The part of the movie that really grabbed me was (SPOILERS…)
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…when Noa starts having meals with her abductor, Steve. Meals of expertly prepared human flesh belonging to other women. I believe the film is gloriously feminist, so I don’t want anything I say here to be misconstrued. But I did wonder how that act, the consuming of the flesh of other women, might have changed how Noa felt about herself and her own womanhood.
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(END SPOILERS) If you’ve read any good essays or pieces of criticism on Fresh, please send them my way.
I’m not saying I would go to extremes here, but if they engineered or grew human flesh in a lab, would you taste it? I would. Let me know what you would do in the comments.
This is the first installment of ‘Women Be Eating,’ a mini-series on books that explore the greater relationship between women and consumption in literature. This is a fledgling thought for me, so let’s see where it goes! There are spoilers ahead, so make sure you read the book first if you care about such things.
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
I was so intrigued by this book when it was released in 2020. Unfortunately, 2020 was a bad year for focus (obviously), so my library loan expired before I could pick it up. This was the first book I thought of after watching Fresh, and I was excited to check it out again. The library is always there for you! A heads up that there are spoilers for A Certain Hunger below, so if you are one to care about such things, I recommend you read the book and then come back.
What’s the book about?
Clearly satirical, A Certain Hunger takes the form of a memoir written by Dorothy, convicted murderess, while she’s serving time for her crimes. Admitted psychopath Dorothy is not just a killer. She’s also a food critic, and a well paid one at that. But here’s the thing: she’s also a cannibal. Almost all of her victims became lovingly prepared luxurious dishes, for her exploration and enjoyment. And before they shared her plate, they also shared her bed. From lover to lunch. Sorry.
Dorothy knows she’s a psychopath from a young age, and she is unapologetic about it. This mostly manifests in Dorothy taking exactly what she wants (usually men), while securing the appropriate amount of insurance against potential harm from her actions (aka consequences). To Dorothy, this means digging up devastating personal secrets about her lovers and holding them like nuclear missiles in the event a lover ever betrays her.
It isn’t until she’s a young woman that she kills for the first time. His name was Giovanni, and she ate his liver. Dorothy seems to claim that she doesn’t really mean to murder her victims, and yet most of her murders are meticulously planned, premeditated to an exhaustive degree. And she certainly puts thought into the menu for the meal that follows. Perhaps Dorothy sees their death as inevitable, and that she is entitled to the act of taking their lives. But more on that later.
Side note…I would love it if someone smarter than me looked into the meals that Dorothy prepares with her dead lovers’ corpses to see if the food choices have any kind of symbolic significance. Are they foods from various myths or folklore? Are there biblical or religious references I’m missing as a raging atheist? Let me know.
My thoughts.
I’m happy I was unable to read A Certain Hunger until now. I would have loved it back in 2020, but I really needed something like this to read right in this particular moment. Everything about this reading experience felt right. So I guess I’ve spoiled the fact that I adored A Certain Hunger.
We all knew that the summer of 2022 was going to feel chaotic, and that many of us would feel dizzy and unmoored. I think this is the perfect book to read during these hot months, while we drink our painful cocktails (painful for us to drink, or painful for them to make), get brick red lipstick on our teeth, turn up the volume on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love or Thelonious Monk, and toy with the idea of picking up smoking again. You’ll want to read this perpetually drunk on red wine, honey, and olive oil. The best way I can describe the feeling this book gave me is ‘unhinged Nora Ephron’. I would kill to get Delia Ephron and Sophia Coppola to collaborate on an adaptation.
Author Chelsea G. Summers wrote an excellent article for The Face magazine titled “How Girlboss Cannibals Slayed Pop Culture.” It won’t surprise you that I’ve been collecting articles about female cannibals as I read through my pre-selected reading list, and this one was really hitting all the vibes for me. It includes great recommendations for film, music, books, and culture in general if you are interested in diving into this “ratlife.” Some of the books mentioned in Summers’ article are on my ‘Women Be Eating’ reading list.
From the opening paragraph:
If the algorithms and trend pieces are correct, 2022 will replace the hot girl’s waxed ‘n’ vaxxed seamless perfection with a sloppy, chaotic and faintly debauched figure. Appetite rules in 2022, and bodies must be fed…This summer, all the feral girl wants is to enjoy her unapologetically stinky, messy self.
For the record, I became obsessed with Fresh and this concept of women consuming things before I read that article. Just want to make that clear!
Again, I state: I loved A Certain Hunger. I loved the voice, the self-involved diatribes, the admitted unrelatability of our protagonist, the food descriptions and how they’re conflated with descriptions of men and sex. The narrative is cold and distant, which might be best due to how graphic it can get at times. Since this is a narrative coming from Dorothy herself, that tone feels doubly appropriate. It feels detached, which is a wonderful extension of her character. I sometimes did wish it was a bit more active, because I would have loved to see how wild this book could have gotten.
Alongside the sex and murder, Summers works in a solid discussion of human relationships. Dorothy has only one female friend, a woman she started off hating and ruining the life of. This friendship is deeply complicated, and ultimately contributes to Dorothy’s downfall.
Dorothy also only has one truly authentic romantic love. I want to talk more about this, but that discussion would border on intense spoiler territory. I did find Dorothy’s reminiscing about this relationship to be fascinating and powerful, especially since it comes further along in the narrative, after we’ve been witness to her extreme activities. It’s difficult for Dorothy to have these close relationships, because maintaining connections like that takes reciprocation, mutual effort, compassion, and kindness. And Dorothy mostly just has one mode: consume.
“Eat what you love,” they say, and I have. But that’s facile. It’s not merely that I loved Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, and Marco; it’s also that I lost them. And it’s not merely that I loved and lost them; it’s also that I hated them. As much as they were my lovers, they were my enemies, which is more or less all you can hope for from a person with whom you do not share DNA. (p. 200)
When examining this entry in the ‘Women be Eating’ series, it’s important to note that the cannibalism and sexual desire are linked, but not in a way you might expect. Cannibalism does not turn Dorothy on. Her murders are not necessarily driven by the standard sexual motives. Rather, Dorothy wants to consume these men fully. She wants to have controlled power, and she is fully incapable of offering up any vulnerability in return.
“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism,” said Georges Bataille, or maybe he didn’t. I haven’t read the book this quote is supposed to appear in, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, but perhaps I will. (p. 131)
There’s a fun book recommendation for all of us, straight from Dorothy’s mouth! Anyone else interested in picking it up? Should we read it together?
Dorothy is extremely pretentious and arrogant. Despite being extremely practiced in all things human woman (as any self-respecting psychopath would be), she is incredibly unlikable. That’s completely fine for me in terms of the enjoyment I got out of her character and the book. In fact, I loved it. I loved her strong hot takes, her general selfishness, and the fact that she spends a significant amount of time veering off into diatribes about food, food history, and the cultural norms of cannibalism. As others have pointed out, this is a parallel to Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, but instead of music it’s food.
We are treated to flashbacks from Dorothy’s life as a girl, teen, and young woman. As a teen, she lingers on the ways her girlfriends would perform femininity. I found these passages incredibly fascinating.
Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty. Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk. (p. 34)
Another detail of Dorothy’s life that I greatly enjoyed was her growing ire for youth culture. She becomes a grouchy middle-aged woman, blaming the downward turn in magazine publishing and food writing on Millennials, like any self-respecting Boomer would. Do I actually like this quality in a human? No, especially as a Millennial myself. But do I delight in it for Dorothy? Absolutely. It’s perfect for her. Especially since we get passages like this out of it:
They don’t care about being incognito; indeed, they don’t want to be—they want to be friends with the chef. They want free food; they want to meet the maestro; they want to whip out their iPhones and Instagram their meals as they’re being made. They want more than to rub elbows; they want to kiss asses. (p. 181)
I fucking hate those people, too, Dorothy.
The moment where Dorothy offers up a deep dive to readers concerning the cultural acceptance of cannibalism is one of my absolute favorite parts of A Certain Hunger. She makes a fascinating point by saying that the English language itself is full of violent cannibalistic imagery, woven into everyday conversation. As a society firmly sunk into late-stage capitalism, and one that was native born to capitalism in the first place, it makes sense that the vocabulary of violent, nonconsensual consumption would be how we naturally communicate. Dorothy fits into this world so perfectly that she might be one of the few truly authentic Americans.
Ultimately, Dorothy was looking for full consumption of these men. She consumed them sexually, she consumed them emotionally, and then when she finished them in every other way, she killed and ate them. Only then does she feel she has fully experienced them, has fully overpowered them. Power shoulder pads, power lipstick, power hair, power heels. For a woman coming up in the era she did, the outlets to gain power were strictly defined and controlled. I love to think of this as Dorothy’s ultimate power play. Is this an examination by grotesque expansion of Boomer greed and selfishness (sorry, Boomers)? Or perhaps a unique look at the frenzied, insufferable Girl Boss trope that Millennials got caught up in? It does feel that way. But I also like to think that it’s just Dorothy being Dorothy…my new best friend.
Dorothy’s downfall is deliberately Shakespearean. Summers even quotes Hamlet when describing the acts that lead to Dorothy’s undoing. So perfectly appropriate. Dorothy is such a strong character, and I enjoyed every second of my time with her. She’s the hero we deserve. She’s the mascot of Summer 2022. Everyone, light your newly acquired American Spirits, toast each other with your ice cold martinis, and take that bite of your first foie gras. We’re getting nasty.
I leave you with this quote from Dorothy:
You may not admit it aloud, but I know you will read this book and wonder how your lover would taste sauteed with shallots and mushrooms and deglazed with a little red wine. You read, and you wonder, and you know the answer would be delicious. Roll that word around in your mouth and feel the tang of its call. (p. 100-101)
Additional Recommendations
If you are intrigued by A Certain Hunger… perhaps reading Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho or Nora Ephron’s Heartburn with a Blood Orange cocktail while listening to Thelonious Monk will tickle your fancy. If you want more of the strong, unhinged female character vibe, I absolutely recommend The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Fay Weldon.
In more of a movie mood? Well, you can’t go wrong with Fresh. And you can rest assured that it ends well. Or maybe even the adaptations of the other books mentioned here.
Unrelated to the book of the month, I’d like to recommend Matrix by Lauren Groff. I recently read this beautiful novel and gave it a full five stars. It’s about lesbian nuns in 12th century England who are physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally powerful! They trick the men around them and exploit power systems to create their own utopia (but is such a thing ever possible?). There are no main male characters in this book!
Matrix focuses on Abbess Marie, who is suggested to be the mysterious 12th century poet Marie de France. Marie is cast out of royal society by Eleanor of Aquitaine for being oafish and awkward. So Marie is charged with this failing, sickly abbey, and she uses her intelligence and her force of will to not only turn it around, but to build it into one of the most powerful and wealthy abbeys in England.
I loved Matrix because of its honesty and its focus on the mundane beauty of life and love and pain and accomplishment. It’s so good, and the writing is stunning. Definitely more character focused than plot focused, for those of you who pay attention to such things.
Next Month
I’ve decided to let you all know what book I’ll be featuring in the next month’s entry in order to give you time to read it if you’d like. August’s book will be The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich. This book is NOT a part of ‘Women Be Eating’, despite it being about some form of vampire. Trigger warnings for…a lot. Sexual assault, homelessness, addiction, vomit, abandonment, probably more that I’m forgetting. It was an incredibly intense read. Don’t worry, we’ll lighten up soon.