Field Notes from a Reader: You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

The protagonist, referred to only as A, eats mostly oranges and is obsessed with a commercial advertising the chemical food product Kandy Kakes, sold at the chain supermarket Wally’s. Her perception of her own body is a constant fixation and drives her to desire a life that promises more than what she has been sold through advertising. Her inability to satisfy her hunger will lead her down a path of radical transformation that may or may not hold the answers she seeks. 

Kleeman writes in intricate detail about the body—particularly the movements and interior workings of the body rendered in a very physical, visceral way. There is an intensity, even in the smallest details, of how the body moves and interacts with its surroundings. Kleeman is not afraid to slow down, to force the reader inside the bodily experiences of her characters:

“I was standing in my room in front of the mirror, peeling an orange. I cradled its exact weight in my palm, sinking a nail through the topmost layer. I dug a finger under its kin until I felt cool flesh, then I rooted that finger around and around. The rind tore with a soft, cottony sound, the peel one smooth, blunt piece trailing off the fist of the fruit.” (2)

This attention to detail allows Kleeman to turn the ordinary into the uncanny. By rendering the mundane into the inexplicable, the inexplicable becomes the mundane. Kleeman accomplishes this by plumbing the intimate depths the narrator’s obsession with flesh, all through excruciatingly intricate details which renders the ordinary almost entirely unrecognizable: 

“The smooth edges of the cutlets: as if they had just grown that way, perfect and glandless. As if they had been peeled off, gently, from a larger cutlet, a mass long and cylindrical and placid. That even, stirred-together color of the flesh, the occasional streak of pure white that trailed off the side, hinting that it had a history as something larger. Such beauty in the lack of ducts and orifices, unitary and complete, impossible to feed it or cause it pain. A pasture full of veal cutlets sitting under the sun, looking eyelessly up." (27)

This level of detail allows Kleeman to slowly pull the reader deeper and deeper into the absurd. Even the most mundane elements are broken down into the smallest of details, and by the time the strangest elements are occurring, they are rendered with the same level of care and precision and seem just as plausible as the ordinary elements in the novel.

Kleeman, Alexandra. You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine. Harper, 2016.