I have a bad habit of buying books with the intention to read them immediately then letting them marinate on my bookshelf for months (or even years sometimes). Woman, Eating by Claire Kodha was something I picked up on a crisp fall day a few years ago because the seasons were changing and it seemed like the perfect moody read for a cloud covered day spent at home on the couch.
This book could have been everything I wanted it to be based on the blurb on the inside of the dust jacket. I thought Kodha’s story would give me one woman’s intense rumination on what makes someone feel monstrous and what it means to be human, but it ended up spiraling into surface level observations I never quite connected with.
Lydia is a mixed race vampire living on her own in London for the first time after admitting her mother (who is also a vampire) into an assisted living facility for memory care. She is obsessed with the act of eating, though she can only consume blood, and wrestles with the desires of her human and vampire halves. Her ever present struggle with her identity has led to an isolated life riddled with uncertainty and a longing for connection. Should she allow herself to get close to people when she will always outlive them? Is she a monster like her mother says? Can she make herself human through sheer willpower?
This story of a young woman who keeps herself at arm’s length from everything and everyone works with topics like race, identity, intimacy, and mental illness, which never seem to come together throughout the story to form a cohesive narrative. Lydia’s story could have been a complex and nuanced look at what makes someone human, yet in the end it was a slug to get through all of her complaining and longing to fit in with everyone else. She never really gives life much of a try, preferring to remain isolated as she observes the way others interact and connect. I felt so distanced from Lydia’s character as a reader that I couldn’t find a way to sympathize with her which led to a lack of caring what happened at all.
The heart of this story for me should be Lydia’s relationship with her mother, which is mostly explored on the surface without a deeper dive into their individual and shared trauma. We get small drops of information about her mother’s past and her relationship with Lydia’s human father, but I found myself wanting more so I could better understand where Lydia’s hesitancy to get close to other people comes from. Lydia spends so much time watching others and observing without doing much at all to add some level of enjoyment to her life despite the whole being a vampire thing working against her. It’s clear the thoughts and feelings her mother has projected on her have led to her self-isolation and depression, but I want to know what happened to her mother to make her that way. How did her parent’s relationship inform the way her mother has taught her to see the world?
Then there is the matter of the people in Lydia’s periphery. At best they are a mixed bag of strangers you never get to know enough about to form an opinion, except for Ben, who objectively sucks despite Kodha’s work to make him seem somewhat charming. Lydia has a crush on Ben, but it doesn’t seem for any reason other than he is nice to her. Mostly, Lydia non-commitally daydreams about what it might be like to be friends with these people she passes in the hallway of her art studio. I wanted this book to be steeping with complicated emotions and actual sadness when it comes to Lydia’s situation instead of her nonchalant attitude toward almost everything. She mostly seems just fine living a shell of a life because she will never die and it irked me. Even her attempts at art felt half-hearted.
I walked away from the book wondering what the point of it all was. Maybe I simply wasn’t the target audience for this sad girl lit fic story. By the time things started to get interesting and Lydia pushed herself to the edges of hunger I wasn’t invested. This one ends up with a 2/5 star rating.
The Rummy Writer 