Hungering — Ananda Devi

A wild, bomb-throwing teenage revenge plot that skewers the cults of consumerism and the body beautiful.Ananda Devi's protagonist is tormented at school because of her weight and is haunted by the sister her father believes she devoured in the womb. This, she thinks, is how he accounts for her enormous size: she is not one but two.Her father is gleefully devoted and plies her with increasingly indulgent feasts; at school her fellow students and even teachers seek to humiliate her with an almost demonic insistence; in the midst of all this she struggles to see who she is beyond the world’s perceptions of her and her size.When she gets an unexpected, heady taste of the other pleasures of the body, she briefly feels the radiant possibility of another kind of life. But the great eye of the mob turns on her once more and she devises one drastic, final, self-destroying way to turn the tables on her persecutors and the whole unjust world.In Hungering, Devi deploys keenly lyrical prose to stage a revenge plot with dark humor that tears apart the hypocrisies around how we talk about bodies, women, beauty, obsession, and consumption, and how society consumes, obsesses over, and vilifies the Other.