Book Review: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

  

   

     Title: Woman, Eating
     Author: Claire Kohda
     Published: April 12th 2022 @ Harpervia
     Genre: Urban Fantasy, Literary Fiction
    

     Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Lydia,” she said, using my full name, which she only did when she was angry. “Do you think God would feed a body like yours?”

Contrary to popular belief, I am not actually a hot sad girl in the same way that TikTok would have me be. I don't own a single product by Glossier, or white linen bed sheets, and I only very occasionally stare wistfully out my window wishing for another kind of life that doesn't involve my sad disaffected 20-something problems. Okay, mostly. Okay, scratch that last part. 

Woman, Eating's Lydia is That Girl. The girls that get it get it, and Lyd gets it more than she could ever want to. She is, after all, a twenty-something artist dealing with alienation from the people around her in the wake of her newfound independence, working a job that isn't all it was promised to be, and she's hungry. She has that kind of contemporary dissatisfaction emblematic of the genre, popularized by the likes of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh. But she's also gross and distinctly inhuman-- she forgets to shower and she leaves animal carcasses in her apartment. Her sadness isn't neatly contained; instead it spills over and poisons every one of her relationships, and this book is more about her desperate attempts to contain the untidiness of her animalistic needs than it is about anything else. 

This book is listless and uncertain, because Lydia is listless and uncertain. She's alone for the first time in her life, having been stifled by the constraints of her mother and the way her mother used shame to control their vampiric affliction, and she's floundering. She isn't able to properly feed herself, nor is she able to take care of her space, or maintain a polite distance from the people in her life that she knows could be hurt by her. Every exciting opportunity turns out to be a double-edged sword, and while she doesn't want to return to her mother, she also isn't prepared for any of this. And while definitely there are vampires in this book, it's only really tangentially about vampirism. Instead, the book concerns itself with the strange maladaptation of our upbringings, and the twisted way our roots grow out as we leave home for the big open world. 

Woman, Eating is two parts coming of age, one part contemporary malaise, and I think that a lot of readers are going to walk into this expecting something else. Vampire novels are rarely so quiet, so gently unnerved, and while it would be tempting to expect this to be this dramatic tragedy, what we find instead is a young woman grasping to find a way to fit her appetites into her life. It is both literally and figuratively about a woman eating, and for some, that might not be enough. But for the right person, when this book finds its reader, it is absolutely perfect.