The Cannibalism Novel I Read Out Loud to My Baby

“Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable.”

I read aloud. My daughter gazes up at me from her bassinet and parts her lips — I think she approves. These days, this is the only way I get any reading done.

“Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother’s love, a father’s love, a lover’s love, a friend’s love, an enemy’s love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-pushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage,” (Summers).

In this way, the provocative and darkly funny writing in Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger served as my sustenance in those first postpartum weeks. The novel follows Dorothy Daniels, a snobbish and brilliant food critic, as she seduces, slaughters, and ultimately sautés five men. She ends up in prison after attempting to murder her only woman friend, Emma Absinthe, who she fears may have learned of her crimes. The novel closes with Dorothy opening a letter from Emma, who admits she knows everything but promises she’ll never tell.

As a whole, the novel is a feminist American Psycho that somehow had me rooting for a sadistic narrator and marveling at every mouthwateringly overwritten chapter. I found it hilarious. And disgusting. And romantic. And — dare I say — relatable?

Reading about Dorothy’s delight in the body’s urges, fluids (yup), and hungers while sitting in my own postpartum body felt unsettling in a strangely cathartic way. Growing and expelling a small human is its own form of body horror, and maybe that’s why the book landed so hard: it mirrored my own sense that my body had become something foreign, frightening.

I’m just glad my daughter couldn’t understand what I was reading — and grateful that, even in those strange, sleepless early months of motherhood, a book could satisfy both my hunger for humor and my appetite for darkness.