you are what you eat - a review of "woman, eating" by Claire Kohda

     I think there's this kind of unspoken agreement amongst those who engage in literature that the literary canon has already been created - that its full, and there's no room for any more books in it. Even more so, there seems to be some kind of understanding that anything good has already been written - that books that encourage self-reflection, ones that engage with the human condition, can't possibly be written this century. Now, I definitely don't agree - over the course of this blog, I have read many contemporary texts that have made me think, reflect and engage in the ways all good books should. Claire Kohda's Woman, Eating perfectly exemplifies what I know to be true - the novel is so perfectly situated in our current moment, so unapologetically contemporary, and so thoughtful and engaging.

Woman, Eating is easy to read, slipping down through your mind like soup or juice, but it still is capable of powerful introspection and its preoccupation with food - with taste, with flavour - is mirrored in the language throughout the narrative. Lyd's disconnect from her heritage as a East Asian and South East Asian woman is represented by her inability to consume food; her vampirism that separates her from humanity literalises her feelings of loss over not knowing her father, and not knowing enough about her mother's Malaysian heritage. We see the manifestation of this loss when she finally stops starving herself and feeds on Gideon. In tasting the food she so desperately wanted to taste because of her Japanese father - the nori and soba noodles - and also feeling an overwhelming connection to the Malaysian food she didn't even know she craved, Lyd finally becomes nourished.

This interplay between the starved vampire and the disconnected woman is even more perfectly exemplified by her mother; her mother who is convinced they are not worthy of more than pig's blood, that they are demons made flesh, and her mother, who Lyd understands as having the deep desire of being entirely British, not Malaysian at all - an irony, since her mum is convinced the monster of vampirism was born entirely of colonisation. But rather than finding anger at the coloniser, her mum rather restricts and denies herself any pleasure.

Kohda's ability to draw you carefully and deftly through the narrative, to feel and taste every part of Lydia's life is exceptional and it feels as if we are Lydia, or a vampire like her, relishing every part of the life of their victim; the freedom of the duck, the oily predator in Gideon, the grief and joy in Ben. Kohda reminds us that life is short, and full of twist and turns, pains and joys. That we should connect our past and our future. That, really, we should eat whatever the fuck we want. Nothing good comes from denying ourselves.