ALL FLESH

A sometimes-revelatory exploration of embodiment and desire.

“No sooner did I come into being than I began to expand endlessly. I overflowed every space in which life had tried to contain me. I had no limits.” The protagonist and narrator of this slim, problematic book is 22 pounds at birth and just keeps growing. Her mother abandons her when she’s an infant. Her father dedicates himself to feeding her. He also creates a mythical double for the protagonist: A twin she devoured in utero. This twin—incorporeal and therefore ideal—haunts and taunts the protagonist. This is less a traditional novel than an extended rant with narrative digressions, but it is—at the beginning, anyway—horribly compelling. The ghost twin is a brilliant metaphor for the sense that so many women and girls have that their true self is thin and perfect while their actual body is a cruel lie. The protagonist herself serves as a monstrous other for her peers and, ultimately, for the whole world of people who live online. They judge her body, mock her body, and use her body to reassure themselves about their own bodies. The book takes a turn when Devi seems to take the side of the oppressors. “I’m immoderation made manifest, a terror and a death spiral.” This is the narrator describing herself as the embodiment of a global society afraid of freedom and feeding from “the dual teats of gluttony and pornography.” Later, the protagonist will declare that she is “proof that human agency is an aberration,” suggesting that her body is the result of an addiction to excess. In a lengthy passage that takes place inside a toilet stall in her school bathroom, the protagonist imagines herself—rather longingly—as a piece of shit. Devi is angry about things it’s reasonable to be angry about. Fat girls have been an all-encompassing, all-consuming symbol of excess for quite some time. Making the fat girl eat her own flesh while livestreaming might not be the innovative flex Devi thinks it is.

Disturbing throughout, ultimately in ways that undermine the author’s core message.