The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, by Anissa Gray, is interesting and well-written; it should be a satisfying novel.

In the last few weeks I’ve been talking about the power of the personal in essays, how starting with the particular can illuminate bigger issues. In the case of this novel, however, I can’t make that work. I had problems reading the story of Althea and her sisters and daughters that I’m not prepared to explain in detail and which you probably wouldn’t share if I did. Sometimes the personal interferes with a person’s enjoyment of a novel, and that was the case with me and The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls.

I was a ravenously hungry girl, in all the ways a person can imagine, but I did not react the way two of the characters in this novel do, by becoming anorexic or bulimic. I did enjoy it when the oldest sister, who raised two younger sisters and a brother, quotes something she claims her mother used to say: “words can either feed you or eat you alive.” And I agree with the bulimic character, Viola, when she says “it’s not as easy as eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’ve had enough. Sometimes there’s never enough.” But even though you might think the food issues would make these characters sensitive to body issues, they talk about other characters like this: “a real sweet lady. Real fat, though. You know, the kind that’d be pretty if they lost some weight?”

I value loyalty over many other virtues, and so it was hard for me to sympathize with Althea’s daughter Kim, who has turned her mother in and gotten her sent to prison—even though part of why Kim did it is her mother’s relentless nagging about her weight. We see one instance of this through her aunt Viola’s eyes when Viola says:
“’like, just today, you didn’t have to call her out on her outfit in front of the staff. You must know how humiliating that is, Althea. And besides, that’s what the girls are wearing.’
‘Not girls like her.’ Althea’s eyes darted over in Kim’s direction with unmasked disdain. ‘She’s too big for skinny jeans.’”
And we hear from Kim herself, who is still “just a kid,” as someone reminds Althea, that the phone call to the police happened just minutes after the episode about the jeans, when Kim was overhearing the conversation between her mother and aunt and says “I just wanted to go home and to my room and before I knew it I had my phone out and I was calling the police on her.”

Althea and the other characters do come to an understanding about why they’ve acted as they have. Near the beginning of the novel, Althea thinks to herself that when she ran away to get married at eighteen, she was “thinking I’d never have to do anything I didn’t want to do again. That’s how young I was.” Then, near the end of the novel, she asks herself “If, as a mother, I am my father’s daughter, and I hate everything about him, what am I as a sister, who was all the mother they had?” We see that Althea, her father, and her brother have all felt, as her brother puts it, “the weight of being the head of his family, his struggles keeping everybody in line, and the problems that came from sparing the rod and spoiling the child.” The events of the novel take place as that weight is being distributed among the rest of the family members.

So it’s a fine novel, and well-written, even though it did not satisfy me.