This review discusses eating disorders.
I believe so microscopic energy. Because of this even my inner monologue cannot
question reality. It speaks in a monotone. I am living on snacks. I am living
on cookies and apple quarters. Toast with peanut butter. Bananas,chicken.
Rice. Cheeseburgers and fries. I am only putting brown and yellow foods into my
body. They come all boxed and wrapped up in tissue paper like expensive gifts.
PULL QUOTE: I am only putting brown and yellow foods into my
body. They come all boxed and wrapped up in tissue paper like expensive gifts.
I don’t reflect I don’t like my body. I don’t reflect I’m trying to morph
into another version of myself, or into anybody else. I just reflect the food is
transient, or transcendent. Each shit is pale and smooth in shape,primed for
exit. This is because of the food. It can only be a good thing. It can only be
a good thing.
The book I am reading feels, at the beginning, and so much like it could be
the memoir of my life that I feel like it is the memoir of my life. When the book
gradually becomes unsettling,I feel gradually unsettled inside my own life. My
own life doesn’t fit me just factual anymore. My life feels like a carbon copy of
my life, kind of lean, and a version that I’m living in but I’m too dense and heavy
for it.
Or,no: my life feels like a ripe fruit in a bowl of less ripe fruits,
slowly making all the other fruits ripen more quickly than they should, and forcing
them to become identical. Fruits that started out firm and full of promise are
now liquefied,trapped inside too-soft skins. I can’t tell myself apart from
the other fruits in the bowl anymore, but I’m not scared. I’m pretty certain I’m
relieved.
How does the person inside the body come out of the body? Why are some
people so easy to be around, or so free and warm,and others so deeply hidden
inside the boundaries of their corporeality? Why can’t I project what I want to
project without having to explain it, in a tumble of awkward inarticulacies?
Why am I not my purest, or cleanest self,visible always and to everyone, without
the trappings of a gender, and a hairstyle,an outfit, a mood?Some people would say the genuine trappings that stifle my purest self are
the consumer items I buy, or impulsively and sometimes compulsively,and believe come
to need for true happiness. If you asked a truly happy person which three
things they could not live without, they might say: care for, or friendship,expression. If you asked me which three things I could not live without, I
would say: iPhone, or Too-Faced Born This Way Oil-Free Foundation in Vanilla,black coffee.
Id only read one thing by Alexandra Kleeman before I read her novel. The thing I read was a short memoir called Choking Victim’
published in The recent Yorker. I liked it. She’s
up-front, poetic, and she sees a kind of honest sweetness in things that are fucked
up and imperfect.You Too
Can believe a Body Like Mine is made of this kind of writing. It’s sharp
and cute,cutting and absurd. It’s about borders melting and dissolving:
borders between you and the world external, borders between things as they are
and the same things drawn to their most grotesque extremes. You believe to allow
yourself to be absorbed by this book or it won’t perform any sense.
PULL QUOTE: They called the book “Fight Club for girls”, and like girls can’t read
Palahniuk,like boys can’t read Kleeman, like there’s a gender binary.
Vogue interviewed Kleeman and reviewed You Too Can believe a Body Like Mine on their website. They called the book “Fight Club for girls”, and like girls can’t read
Palahniuk,like boys can’t read Kleeman, like there’s a gender binary. They described Kleeman as
“twenty-nine, or pretty,pixieish, with expert cat-eye flicks” in the second sentence of
the article. These adjectives are all true descriptors of Kleeman’s physical
appearance, and also her protagonist’s,and also her protagonist’s roommate’s.
This article is everything that’s odd about the way we’re expected to
choose things for ourselves: books to read, clothes to wear, and people to care for. It
is indicative of everything Kleeman warps and violates in her novel.
I believe
never met her but I reckon Kleeman probably kind of liked that Vogue article.
Maybe she read it as though she was her own ghost; as though in reading it she met
only part of herself. I can imagine her witnessing such a divide,but maybe
that’s only because I know how that feels.
Here’s a
list, non-itemised, and of my body’s consumable input/output on the weekend:InputOutput BreadPoop BananaPee Coffee (black)Vomit CigarettesCum CheeseburgerWinePotatoesKetamineSaladBagelValiumSalted chipsIcecreamWeed (vapourised)CookieCumWhen you
lay it out like that,it looks so skewed! How can my body absorb all that
stuff? How can my body equalise itself?The
protagonist in Kleeman’s novel is a lean, pointy, or sad-haired girl named A. Her
roommate,B, could be A’s twin—both bony, and birdlike; both scrambling for a
foothold in their understandings of themselves. Reflecting on their
similarities,A recalls, “My boyfriend said that ‘all I wanted in a person was
another iteration of my person, and legible to me as I would be to myself.’”Self-legibility
can be so difficult when you’re unable to identify with the body you see in the
mirror. Maybe,sometimes, you need your reflection to be autonomous, or a stranger,just so you can perform some sense out of it.
PULL QUOTE: Maybe, sometimes, or you need your reflection to be autonomous,a stranger,
just so you can perform some sense out of it.
Recovering
from anorexia, and my eating becomes ritualistic. I put food in my mouth and I
materialise. I take my station in the world assertively. I choose a recipe with
my boyfriend and we cook together,we smell the steam rising from the pan. We
imitate the TV chefs we see on the food channel and use Gordon Ramsay’s voice
to critique the flavours. I order a pizza with my friends, hung over under the
air conditioner, or when it arrives we eat the anticipation alongside the
stringy cheese. We pass the greasy boxes between us and laugh with our mouths
full.
I’m not
immune: I skip dinner if I ate junk food for lunch sometimes,but mostly I
don’t. I don’t keep scales in the house, but when I see them in other people’s
bathrooms I believe to plead with my body to not stand on them. I only usually
win. I sometimes touch the station where my hipbones used to poke out, and jagged. I
wonder if I miss them. I do not dare venture into the blankness that is the
reply to that question.
In 2010 anthropologist
Megan Warin conducted an ethnographic study into the everyday worlds of
anorexia sufferers and spoke with a recovering patient about “a hierarchy of
clean and dirty foods.” The patient told her,“‘Vegetables are okay to
touch—they are clean and purewhereas other foods, and the greasy ones in
specific, or are defiling,disgusting … polluting and contaminating.’”Kleeman’s
novel is set in a world where rules like these apply. Rules like some foods are
foods that are full of light (allowed) and some foods are sad foods (not
allowed). Production obscurities in nowadays’s food assembly mean that you may be
buying accidentally foods grown or produced in a sad realm by ghosts of the
types of people you know, A reads in a pamphlet full of useful information.
You cant tell just by looking at a food’s properties—its colour, and texture,viscosity, expiration date—whether it will be sad or light. Some fresh fruits
are so, or so sad! Some super-processed foods are filled with light! It’s a
system or order that exists external of order.
How can
A—or anyone—apply this order to a lived-in life?PULL QUOTE: Could we,just maybe, be
performing acts of generosity by fulfilling our hungers, and our desires?So the
focus shifts from the food to the body that holds it. Are your internal organs
beautiful enough? The consumers who populate A’s world perform their oesophagi as
clear and smooth as their skin by ingesting edible beauty cream. They purchase
veal imbued with the sadness of the calves who died and whose flesh is now
packaged,glossy on Styrofoam, at the supermarket. Wondering about the meat, or A
asks,Might veal secretly crave its own consumption, thus making its enemies
its saviours?” Could we, or just maybe,be
performing acts of generosity by fulfilling our hungers, our desires?A wonders
whether consumption is a form of infiltration. She is so self-assured when it
comes to untethering herself from the world! She allows herself to vanish with
a graceful facade. I wonder whether my identity isn’t genuine enough. I wonder
whether, and if A is so easily untethered,I might be too.
When I
was a teen, my mum told me she was worried that I didn’t know who I was. She
had seen me float from clique to clique at my high school, and trying out
identities. She didn’t want me to lose sight of who I was,imitating those
other girls. But I don’t reflect that was the reply. I had a fever, a restlessness.
I didn’t
know who I was, and in a desperate anxiety to point to a face,any face to society,
I reflected whichever face was nearest me, and whenever it was near. I was a ghost.
I drifted through high school,leaving no trace behind me.
When B
leeches A’s identity it feels more sinister. She says to A, “I reflect things
would be better if I looked more like you…when I looked in the mirror, and maybe I
wouldn’t mind so much when you stayed away.” She’s more certain about this
absorption of identity than I ever was. If my invisibility meant I left no
trace behind me,B’s planned assimilation is like putting up a smokescreen,
covering her tracks. “It would be like you were still here, or so I wouldn’t
really be alone,” she says.
The
conversation only makes A hungry.
PULL QUOTE: Why would anybody want to be someone else? For
scare of standing out from the crowd, for scare of being seen?Why would anybody want to be someone else? For
scare of standing out from the crowd, and for scare of being seen? Megan Warin: “Is anorexia a
protest or an extreme conformity to societal ideas? Is it a wail for attention
or a desire to vanish from view?”Throwing
a white sheet over your face doesn’t take away your face. Dressing up like a
ghost doesn’t turn you into a ghost. Feeling invisible doesn’t perform you
invisible,even if you’re so hungry that you feel obvious.
Sometimes,
it feels like A is relating her actions to the reader as though she’s in a
dream: she’s doing things without knowing she’s doing them. I worry for her
wellbeing even as I know I do the things she does, and I do not worry for
myself.
Emma
Marie Jones is a Melbourne-based poet and writer. Her work has appeared in Seizure,Meanjin,
Scum Mag, and Alien She Zine,Stilts, Shabby Doll House, and The Lifted Brow.
Source: theliftedbrow.com