You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Alexandra Kleeman, 2015
HarperCollins
3045 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062388674
Summary
An intelligent and madly entertaining debut novel 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1985-86
• Raised—Colorado, Japan, and elsewhere
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University; Ph.D., University of
California-Berkeley (working towrd)
• Currently—lives in Staten Island, New York
Alexandra Kleeman, whose parents are both professors, grew up in places like Japan and Colorado. She started blogging in high school, joking, "I was pretty big in the Asian-American web log community."
After high school, Kleeman went to Brown University, where she studied cognitive science and creative writing. She received her M.F.A in fiction from Columbia University and is working toward her Ph.D. in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
At the age of 24, Kleeman published her first short story in the Paris Review and has continued to write for the Review as well as for Zoetrope, Guernica, Tin House, and n+1. She has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute.
Currently, Kleemena lives on Staten Island with her fiance, the novelist Alex Gilvarry. (Adapted from the publisher and Observer.com.)
Book Reviews
This is not a breezy summer read, but it’s cerebral, sharp, funny - and worth the ride.
New York Post
A satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.
Chicago Tribune
Kleeman serves up a clever satire of our culture’s ever intensifying obsession with health, diet, and body image
Los Angeles Magazine.
The smartest, strangest novel I’ve read in a while (Staff Pick).
Paris Review
This debut novel by future superstar Alexandra Kleeman will be the thing to be seen reading this summer. Pick it up if you want to up your summer cool factor . . . . .Very funny, perfectly weird, a hyperintelligent commentary on a culture obsessed with you and fame.
Vanity Fair
Alexandra Kleeman has written Fight Club for girls.
Vogue.com
Excellent.... Sprinkled with detailed summaries of invented advertisements, the book describes a consumer landscape just on the far side of plausible. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a story about realizing you’re hungry and trying to find out what for.
Slate
Her darkly satirical debut lays bare the ravages of advertising-fueled culture and consumerism, through a purposefully distorted version of our reality. Fans of DeLillo, Pynchon and Shteyngart are advised to take note.
Huffington Post
Alexandra Kleeman’s brilliant debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine is at once eerie and strange and beautiful, an incisive commentary on contemporary culture and womanhood.
Buzzfeed
Don’t be fooled by the sassy title-the cravings that lurk beneath the surface in this completely original debut will haunt what a body means to you indefinitely.
Marie Claire
(Starred review.) [A] fever dream of modern alienation.... It's a testament to Kleeman's ability that the text itself blurs and begins to run together.... This is a challenging novel, but undoubtedly one with something to say. One wonders what Kleeman will come up with next.
Publishers Weekly
Absurdist observations evoke masters like DeLillo and Pynchon, as well as the “hysterical realism” of Ben Marcus and Tom Perrotta, bringing a refreshingly feminist frame to the postmodern conversation. While ambitious in scope and structure, sharp humor and brisk storytelling ground the existential angst in Kleeman’s page-turning, entertaining performance.
Booklist
"I had hoped happiness would be warmer, cozier, more enveloping. More exciting, like one of the things that happen on TV to TV...." [T]here's writing just like that on nearly every page. At the narrative level, though, this novel barely moves.... Existential paralysis is a great subject for short fiction but a more difficult one for a novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine:
1. What is the significance of the book's title, "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine"?
2. Talk about this novel as social commentary. What aspects of contemporary culture does it comment on? What does it suggest about the quality of our lives and how our aspirations are shaped?
3. The novel has been described as existential, difficult, disorienting, even alienating. Is the book primarily intellectual? Or does it resonate with you on a personal level? If so, what parts in particular?
4. How would you describe A and B and C? Why are they identified as such: why might the author have used letters rather than names for her characters? Do you see any aspect of yourself (or anyone you know) in A, B, or C?
5. Talk about A's fascination with Kandy Kat, both literally (as a plot element in the story) and metaphorically (what it might signify symbolically).
6. Why does A turn to the Church of the Conjoined Eaters? What practices of society does the church satirize?
7. Overall, what does the book suggest about the female body and it's "function" in society? Do you agree with A's view that "A woman’s body never really belongs to herself"?