A sad bloodsucker - Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (Review)

 A/N: This review contains spoilers for Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda. This is your spoiler warning.

Stories of young people navigating their twenties intrigue me. Stories of new adults fresh out of college, stepping into the workforce and finding their place in the world. The realization of how immense the world is and how insignificant our lives are- no longer feeling like the centre of our own personal universe is jarring to say the least. When capitalism finally hits you in the face, it’s hard to feel like a hopeful main character carving out your niche. Literature that captures this raw feeling of being lost and lonely satiates my longing to be understood. Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda traces the intricacies of coming of age with the fascinating touch of a vampire main character.

Unlike most vampire fiction where Vampires are love interests and seductresses, Woman, Eating follows a depressed vampire in her twenties as she grows into her own after having been brought up in the shadow of her controlling Vampire mother. It’s a literary novel that follows Lydia, our protagonist, as she accomplishes new firsts- her first internship, her first time living by herself and her first encounter with people and the real world without having a parental figure to fall back on. 

It starts with Lyd aka Lydia- a performance artist, moving into a studio inside an old biscuit factory that’s been turned into a building with several studios for artists. According to the rules, she’s not supposed to live in the studio but she decides to make it her home (having cut off ties with her old life) - her childhood home sold and her mother (who suffers from vampire dementia?) sent to a home meant to care for the old and disabled. The biscuit factory is where she meets Ben, a human artist she quickly becomes interested in. We follow along as she sets up her house and starts a career.

There’s no linear plot to speak of as it’s mainly a character study as Lyd works at her art gallery internship, faces misogyny, visits her mother and deals with her loneliness and hunger. We follow her as she reconciles her relationship with food as a vampire, how she tries to find a balance between her human and ‘demon’ halves, and her English, Japanese and Malay roots. She craves human food and watches food content on YouTube despite being a creature that can only consume blood. She talks about all the art that has influenced her, her dead father who used to be a famous artist and the history of her mother- a very old vampire who’d been turned against her will. The juxtaposition of her parentage having roots in both a colonizer and the oppressed country. Her self loathing and depression are constant companions in her isolation. 

I enjoyed the atmospheric writing and set up. You can truly feel the cold dripping into your bones as Lydia walks through rain and the ache of the hunger with which she craves for food. You feel a deep satisfaction when she consumes human blood for the first time and the vindictive actions that follow. It was a bit too slow-paced for my liking. But I honestly had a fun time looking up the food and artwork that the author references which added more depth to my reading experience. (Highly recommend doing that if you pick this up!) I also quite enjoyed the parts where Lydia tests theories and talks about things she learned about Vampires from mainstream media. 

If you’re someone who loves literary novels with sad, unhinged women and a coming-of-age storyline, this book would be perfect for you. I personally wouldn’t recommend this book to people who enjoy vampires in the capacity of horror or fantasy though.

(Please feel free to take my advice with a grain of salt, literature doesn’t exist with harsh lines separating genres and most of us read with the hope of finding something unexpected and novel with every new book that we encounter. If the idea of a feminist story with a young, depressed, artistic vampire intrigues you- please do give this a shot!)

Here’s a few lines that I liked when I first read the book:

A human’s blood, not a pig’s, two legs, upright and elegant, hints of something—of foods and memories and experiences, of birth, of being ill and getting better, of love and grief and fear—in its flavor.

(I liked that this was a detail in Kohda’s world-building - being able to experience the memories ingrained into blood.)

I wanted it to look like I was a part of whatever material I was using and it was a part of me. I think that those works came from a kind of naive and youthful desire to be seen for what I was. For my body to be seen for what it is: this un-decaying, eternal thing—familiarly human, but also not.

In the past when men have watched me, usually in public places, I’ve wanted to kind of fold my body away. In those moments, I’ve felt more human than I ever usually do, more woman than I usually do, more defined by my shape than what’s inside me.

(Downsides of being an immortal with a female body. I’d never thought of it this way.)

There had been something unsettling about the way he looked at the paintings, and I think now that it was because he could easily just purchase them, and hang them in his own home, and make it so that he was the only person in the world who could look at those works ever again in his lifetime.

(I honestly liked the discourse about art and ownership. And all the references to artists and their works.)

A/N: Thank you for reading the second installment in the ‘Vampire era’ of my Women of Words series where I read and review Vampire fiction for fun. This one was a difficult review to write considering that it’s hard to tell what would constitute a spoiler for a literary novel. 

Also can we just admire the pretty cover and typeface of this book. The book also included a note by the designer of the cover which I thought was an insightful addition.

Will I be addressing the fact that it’s been a whole year since I was supposed to post this book review? Nope. Because no one wants to hear me rave about how fascinating transistors are.

To read the previous installment, here’s my take on Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.