A CERTAIN HUNGER: reviewed by Daisy Alioto
Works referenced
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney, Vintage Books, 1984
How to Murder Your Life, Cat Marnell, Simon & Schuster, 2017
A Certain Hunger, Chelsea G. Summers, The Unnamed Press, 2020
Nobody is partying, so everyone is talking about parties. New York City’s oligarchs in their shiny new broken towers survey a city that has never been hornier for a three martini lunch. In 2020, a large Twitter personality observed a return to the “anything goes” ethos of Brat Pack-era New York media minus the financial largesse. “Someone get Jay McInerney on the horn,” he wrote, in a since deleted tweet.
Sorry, but the old Jay can't come to the phone right now–he’s writing a wine column. Or maybe he was spiritually murdered, along with the rest of his cocaine cohort, by Chelsea G. Summers in her new novel A Certain Hunger.
Summers’s debut is about murder, food, sex–not necessarily in that order, but they are certainly top three–and media, the topic I am going to focus on today.
A Certain Hunger is a classic revenge novel, written from the perspective of incarcerated food critic Dorothy Daniels after killing and eating several ex-boyfriends. It’s a comedy of misandry but also a sharp satire of the media industry circa the high-flying days of expensing town cars and dinners at The Odeon.
“You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never know too much,” cautions the narrator. Aphorisms like this are peppered throughout like juicy pomegranate kernels. She takes great pride in her taste, approaching every murder like a well-crafted review. “I could never be a mass murderer. Mass murder is gauche. Mass murder is to serial killing as McDonald’s is to Peter Luger’s.”
When the main character loses her comfortable magazine columnist job in 2008 (laid off by someone named Chloe–maybe even wearing Chloé...), it’s a fall from grace familiar to anyone in the media industry. When she gets caught doing murder– well, that’s a surprise.
“I toss in my narrow bed and hallucinate espresso and perfect hazelnut biscotti, I hallucinate luscious scallop crudo and crisp Prosecco, I hallucinate a sloppy Corner Bistro burger and a beer,” Daniels writes from prison.
Like Peter Luger, she lives long enough to see her worth downgraded. The criminal’s equivalent of Joan Didion’s warning not to stay at the fair too long. Being found the culprit of a bloated masthead at the same time she’s guilty for far worse crimes is just the kind of irony this book excels in.
Daniels objects: “‘Chloe,’ I said ‘Eat & Drink is going to be nothing but a collection of 2006 Barnard graduates jabbering about cupcakes, recession salmon recipes, Gordon Ramsey and the Momofuku effect.’” Then she does what any rational person would do. She goes freelance and pivots to blogging.
When I read this, I flashed back to the layoff scene in Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City, which also results in an act of random violence. After being laid off by another C (Clara), the narrator sneaks back to the N*w Y*rker to leave a live ferret in her office.
Of course, we hear about how he felt when he first took the job: “Those first months seem now to have been filled with promise. You were convinced of the importance of your job and of the inevitability of rising above it. You met people you had admired half your life...Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.”
Daniels is at the tail end of this same upswing. Fuck a ferret, she raises the stakes–by murdering her former lover,the ousted Eat & Drink publisher, with an appropriately yonic fig.
And what of the next generation? After reading A Certain Hunger, I turned to another media memoir about murder, this one true–How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell.
Although Marnell is a victim of herself, this book is no less instructive about working for years to get “in” and within mere seconds finding yourself “out.” She writes, “Being at Condé Nast made me feel as electric and neon as all of the billboards and flashing lights outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was better than a nightclub! I never wanted to leave.”
Marnell weathers the recession at Lucky, leaves in the throes of addiction, then goes on the blog for Vice and xoJane before making her health and the book her full-time focus. Leaving media on your own terms is a small luxury in 2021. By luxury I mean a Big Mac (rhymes with Substack).
I’m not sure I want to read the next wave of media memoirs. I mean, I lived it. Like American Psycho, some violences need to reach their extremes in order to be properly digested.
This is Chelsea G. Summers’ first novel, a process she documented on Medium. It’s a cathartic read for anyone who has been chewed up and spit out by the great players of New York publishing but lacks the appetite to do anything about it themself.
“The novel languished on the market for almost a year and a half. I got rejected because my voice was too ‘voicey.’ I got rejected because I was ‘too good at writing gore.’ I got ‘enthusiastic’ passes, and I got nondescript passes. I got rejection, in short, so much rejection,” Summers writes on Medium, if you’re into meta commentary.
In an industry where you either self-sabotage your own prospects or live long enough to have your career murdered by the titans of capital, an actual murderess (albeit fictional) is worth getting on the horn for.