In “Text and the City,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books through a lens of modern femininity.
Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
What does it take to thrive as a woman at Stanford? It takes a special kind of femininity: something controlled, curated and impressive. You’re allowed to be ambitious, but not abrasive; powerful, but still likeable; hungry, but only for the right things. “A Certain Hunger” by Chelsea G. Summers takes that framework, then tears through it. The novel serves as a memoir for Dorothy Daniels, a (fictional) glamorous food critic who murders and eats men. Reducing it to guts and gore, however, misses the point. Summers’ novel is really about appetite, and female appetite particularly.
Dorothy narrates her own difference with detached clarity — a girl who grew up knowing she wanted to eat people, then a woman moving through Paris kitchens, New York media, the verified world of food writing. Her lovers are chosen the way dishes are: for intellectual or physical interest, abandoned at the first note of boredom or disgust. The parallel is clear: Dorthy will send a man back like an unsatisfying entreé.
The first murder occurs as an extension of that same impatience. A possessive boyfriend crosses a line, and Dorothy drugs him and kills him — evaluating his flesh the way she would any plate worth a column. Summers refuses us the exit of insanity… and as a reader, I’m gladder for it. This is intriguing experimentation, and Dorothy is good at it. Each killing is narrated through the same clinical voice that made Dorothy’s criticism worth reading: asides on culture, gender, the politics of taste. The cannibalism itself is also portrayed in unsparing detail. This is where Summers asks the most of her readers — forcing us to sit inside a sensibility we might otherwise admire, precise and attuned, and watch it turn toward something monstrous.
Soon, evidence accumulates, suspicion forms, arrest follows. The trial isn’t staged for remorse but for documentation; Dorothy from prison writes in the same voice she always had. She does not apologize or transform. If anything, confinement sharpens her and lets her name what was underneath her actions: “I knew that lust was a dangerous thing… I knew that lust was power — and I wanted power even then,” Summers writes. She isn’t asking the reader to agree, only to notice there was a point all along.
This awareness feels uncomfortably familiar at Stanford. Hunger and desire are everywhere here, but they are carefully watched and channeled into ambition, productivity and success. Like Dorothy, students here yearn for proximity to others. Who is accepted to that club, invited to that party, taken seriously by that CEO? The discomfort of reading “A Certain Hunger” is that Dorothy refuses to use the euphemisms we favor. She won’t name her appetite “ambition” or “networking.” She calls it lust and follows it where it goes. Most of us are doing a softer version of the same thing, and Dorothy’s honesty is unbearable because it makes the structure visible. The people who achieve success aren’t only the talented ones. They’re the ones who knew exactly what they wanted — and who they had to get close to in order to achieve it
On a broader societal note, I also found the novel striking for its inversion of what women are expected to be. Dorothy is not driven by self-defense or desperation to commit these acts of violence. She simply lives to kill, a physical argument against the myth of female moral superiority. Women in this novel do not have to be seen as better, kinder or more moral. Refreshingly, this made the novel feel distinctly modern in its feminism. It insists that equality includes the capacity for cruelty. Men can be violent creatures … So why not us?
I think of the students here who must conceal their hunger behind polite coffee chats, and how Dorothy represents the opposite: a woman who refuses to manage her desire at all. “You who call women the fairer sex,” she says. “Some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway.” It’s an extreme statement, but it does expose the constraints placed on women’s wanting.
“A Certain Hunger” is certainly not an easy book to like. It is excessive, unsettling and often deliberately graphic. But in it, Summers beautifully takes the idea of female appetite and pushes it right up to her readers’ faces, where they can no longer ignore it. The novel forces readers to confront the difference between what women are allowed to want, and what they actually desire if no one were watching.