You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
‘An existential thriller written in prose that points the way to the future’ Zadie Smith
‘Fight Club for girls’ Vogue
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE
A lives with B.
B seems to be becoming more and more like A.
If A’s boyfriend, C, likes A because A is A, but now B is the same as A, where does that leave A?
And what has happened to the family across the street, who left one afternoon out of nowhere, covered in sheets with holes cut out for the eyes?
‘Comical, malignant and addictive’ Adam Thirlwell
‘As good a debut as I’ve ever read’ Zadie Smith
‘This book will unsettle you; this book will make you feel intensely alive’ Buzzfeed
Reviews
‘Alexandra Kleeman understands the difficulty of having a flesh and blood body in a world of images and signs, she knows how it feels to be a hungry girl when appetite is a scandal, and how every relation with another person can feel like a stain on yourself. She has constructed a perfect fable for our present situation, an existential thriller written in prose that points the way to the future. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is as good a debut as I've ever read’ Zadie Smith
‘The next voice of a generation’ Elle
‘Kleeman tackles zeitgeist female themes of wellness, orthorexia and individualism with a sharp and original voice. Most potent is her uncanny fascination with the body, which leaves you feeling totally off-kilter with your own’ Sunday Times
‘Destined to be one of the most talked about books this year’ Reader’s Digest
‘One of the most original debuts I've read in years – complex, brave, vibrant, and brought to life with huge skill and intelligence’ BookBag
‘Everyone knows we inhabit a woozy landscape of flatness, repetition and irregular bodies, and here at last is its hyper-contemporary description. Alexandra Kleeman possesses a new tone – comical, malignant and addictive’ Adam Thirlwell
‘Magnificently weird and wise. Alexandra Kleeman breaks down and breaks apart all the ways in which we know ourselves, and our bodies, and our lovers, and our lovers’ bodies. I didn’t want to miss a word, or an inch’ Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse
‘Excellent. The female body: What to do with it? You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a story about realizing you’re hungry and trying to find out what for’ Slate
About the author
Alexandra Kleeman is a NYC-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among others. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in Harpers, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If Alice in Wonderland was anorexic and living in a chemically enhanced near-future, she might take us on a journey like this. First-time author Alexandra Kleeman follows a young woman named A as she contends with her Single White Female–like roommate, B, and her aloof boyfriend, C. Her increasing disorientation—as well as her feelings about a ubiquitous snack food called Kandy Kakes—leads her to join the Church of the Conjoined Eater, a bizarre but believable cult that melds the spiritual and the commercial. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is virtually impossible to describe, but its weirdness is precisely its appeal. Enjoy the trip.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kleeman's debut novel is a fever dream of modern alienation following A, a young woman living in an unnamed city with B, her roommate, who has a tendency to bite people when she feels cornered. A has a boyfriend, C, who makes things "suddenly, instantaneously normal, just by explaining them." But A's dull proofreading job and her idle time spent watching Shark Week and porn with C start fading away, and events grow increasingly hallucinatory as B begins trying to look more like A (including cutting off her braid and giving it to A), and C becomes more distant. This is a world in which a man buys a supermarket's entire stock of veal, and something called Disappearing Dad Disorder runs rampant. But the strange becomes increasingly ordinary as it's filtered through A's quest to efface herself: "I looked forward to fully becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself." In the third act, a religious cult in which members wear ghostlike sheets takes center stage; members subsist entirely on a synthetic dessert snack called Kandy Kakes and are instructed to "misremember" (erase their own memories through meditative concentration). Kleeman's story is not really like any other, but could be described as a blend of the nightmarish disassociation of DeLillo's White Noise and the phantasmagoria of Bergman's Persona. It's a testament to Kleeman's ability that the text itself blurs and begins to run together that it seems composed more of a uniform, ephemeral language than of a series of discrete scenes. This is a challenging novel, but undoubtedly one with something to say. One wonders what Kleeman will come up with next.
