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New Statesman
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
It-girl literary heroines are all cannibals now
What has happened to the literary woman? She used to slouch listlessly towards Bethlehem. Now she is eating people. Chelsea G. Summers' 2020 novel A Certain Hunger follows a food writer who is in prison for murdering, cooking and eating several sex partners. In Ainslie Hogarth's 2022 novel Motherthing, a woman deals with the Freudian fallout of her mother-in-law's death by cooking a personal enemy. In Monika Kim's 2024 thriller The Eyes Are the Best Part, a Korean-American protagonist gets her own back on white men who fetishise Asian women, by stockpiling and eating their eyeballs. This year's Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito reads like a gory take on Agnes Grey and has its central governess joke about eating the children under her care. There is more. Lucy Rose's bestseller The Lamb, published earlier in 2025, is a misery lit-adjacent tale of childhood abuse with a twist: the young protagonist must come to terms with her mother's taste for lost hikers. Catherine Dang's What Hunger, out later this year, promises to '[follow] the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants… as she grapples with the weight of generational trauma while navigating the violent power of teenage girlhood.' This violent power comes, as the reader may guess, with 'an insatiable hunger for raw meat.' And in the Young Adult sphere there is Maika and Maritza Moulite's 2025 novel The Summer I Ate the Rich, which uses its Haitian-American zombie protagonist to '[scrutinise] the socioeconomic and racial inequity that is the foundation of our society.' Inequity is the largest constant in this emerging genre. Almost every female literary cannibal resorts to cooking and eating people because of trauma in her past, and in each case the trauma is indexed to a larger political concern. Lucy Rose 'explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts.' One of the women in The Lamb has her first brush with cannibalism after she is denied an abortion. 'My body was a stranger,' she says, 'but my father wanted me to bring the baby to term… I gobbled him up in one bite.' The protagonist of A Certain Hunger has no socio-political 'hook' and little discernible trauma. Instead she is off at us from the first page about the 'class privilege' emanating from the hotel bars where she finds her prey, the nature of femaleness ('as abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac') and for-profit prisons, which have been taken over by 'agribusiness.' 'I'm white and educated,' she writes from jail, 'and these privileges get you as far in the incarcerated world as they do in this one.' The Eyes Are The Best Part is about the red-hot intersection of race and hereditary trauma. 'Generational trauma' is a 2020s buzzword. Kim gives us long family dinners, beleaguered parents and stories of Japanese occupation; we even get our customary helping of over-mystified etymology. ('In Korean, the word for 'fortune' is palja,' goes one chapter opening, going on to illustrate a concept of 'fortune' basically the same as our own). Cannibalism is a welcome intrusion. But when our heroine gets down to business we realise her bloodthirsty anger is just another bit of the literary furniture, a convenient 'trope' around which to hang a novel. There is 'rage' and then there is 'female rage' – one of the latest, and also most condescending, literary buzzwords. Penguin Random House offers an online listicle of books that 'explore the depths of female rage, offering catharsis and understanding in a disturbing world.' Their female characters lash out at colonialism and domestic abuse and the expectations of motherhood; Kim's protagonist Ji-won is only driven to pluck out white men's eyeballs because of constant background racism. We get the picture: women are only allowed their explosive excesses of sex and violence if they have some outside justification to feel particularly angry. Nobody placed the same expectation on Sade, who went about spanking and pontificating as he liked. There are few female fetishists in literature; the entirety of A Certain Hunger, with its qualifications and get-out clauses, proves how difficult it is to murder and eat for the joy of it. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe All of this rage and killing and hunger is difficult to square with the mechanics of the literary world. Female readers have spent years subjected to the waverings of Sally Rooney-style heroines, who are never able to formulate a proportional response to the S&M sex they suffer at the hands of indifferent men. The best answer we have had is in Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the Ur-text of what is now called 'messy girl literature': a young woman, scarred by the death of a parent, simply takes a lot of sleeping pills and watches passively as her life spirals out of control. So we get cannibalism, which is symbolically ambiguous enough to work as an acceptable stand-in for all other literary sensuality. Some of the most enthusiastic sex writing of our time is actually about eating people. 'I'm whimpering like a dog,' says Monika Kim's eyeball-eating heroine, as she chews on cartilage. 'But I can't help it… I am in ecstasy.' The food writer in A Certain Hunger relishes 'the satisfying heft of the ice pick in my hand, the balletic arc of my arm, the cinematic spurt of blood.' When we get to our final, sensual standoff, we are allowed to forget all the rest of it. Perhaps the real point of our new bloodthirsty heroine is that she isn't plugged in at all. [See more: Sally Rooney is the conscience of a generation] Related
Elle
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
Greta Lee Will Make Her Directorial Debut With 'The Eyes Are the Best Part'
Greta Lee (Past Lives, The Morning Show) is taking her many talents behind the camera. According to Variety, ELLE's 2023 Women in Hollywood honoree will make her directorial debut with the feature adaptation of The Eyes Are the Best Part. Lee will also pen the script. Here's everything we know so far about the forthcoming Searchlight film. The Eyes Are the Best Part is a psychological horror novel by Monika Kim, which was published last June. The story follows Ji-won, a Korean American college freshman who develops a killer obsession with eating human eyeballs. 'Ji-won is just trying to survive,' Kim told Library Journal. 'With her family falling apart and all of her friends gone, she is painfully aware of the cards that life has dealt her and of being alone out in the world. The seeds of her rage were therefore already planted, and when certain white men come into her life and try to control her, she turns to her deceitful side to get what she wants.' Kim also shared that Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning film Get Out inspired her to write the book. 'Being first and foremost a feminist author, I realized that this genre was the perfect vehicle for me to talk about the experiences of Asian women, but in a fun and interesting way that also provided an outlet for my own sense of humor,' she said. On July 9, Kim posted the film adaptation announcement on Instagram with the simple caption, '👀 👀 👀.' Cast details have not yet been announced. This story will be updated.
