You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation.” —New York Times Book Review
An intelligent and madly entertaining debut novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass that is at once a missing-person mystery, an exorcism of modern culture, and a wholly singular vision of contemporary womanhood from a terrifying and often funny voice of a new generation.
A woman known only by the letter A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality show called That’s My Partner! A eats (or doesn’t) the right things, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials—particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that only exists in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a news-celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up his local Wally Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.
Meanwhile B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction, and becomes indoctrinated by a new religion spread throughout a web of corporate franchises, which moves her closer to the decoys that populate her television world, but no closer to her true nature.
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.
Customer Reviews
Rich with detail
Kleeman writes with such impeccable imagery, I found myself completely drowning in it at times.
She has a way of describing the grotesque in such a captivating light. The images in this book will haunt you, perhaps for the better - perhaps not.
I read this book before bed and it gave me the most incredible lucid dreams. I highly recommend it to anyone who shares a penchant for powerful description and an appreciation for complete sensory immersion.
Waste of time and money
I can read anything and I had a hard time finishing this book. The ending was meh, just like most of the book. I don't recommend.
Nope.
This book is so boring and dry. I tried forcing myself to finish it; about 80% done but I just can't. It's seriously so bad. Who voted this in? Out of the book review club.