Woman, Eating is Claire Kohda's stellar debut novel about a young, mixed-race vampire who must find a way to balance her deep-seated desire to live amongst humans with her incessant hunger.
Ruth Ozeki, Booker-shortlisted author of A Tale for the Time Being calls it “Absolutely brilliant—tragic, funny, eccentric and so perfectly suited to this particularly weird time. Claire Kohda takes the vampire trope and makes it her own in a way that feels fresh and original. Serious issues of race, disability, misogyny, body image, sexual abuse are handled with subtlety, insight, and a lightness of touch. The spell this novel casts is so complete I feel utterly, and happily, bitten.”
Today, we are so excited to feature a guest post from Claire Kohda:
***
I’ve been in a kind of dream state, since writing Woman, Eating. When I wrote it, I barely thought about the fact it would reach the hands of readers one day. I was, at the time in late 2020, living with my cat and my partner, Tom, and not seeing many other people. Lydia, the protagonist, was like a friend I’d somehow conjured. Only very recently have I learned how to talk about her as a character I constructed, as opposed to a person I know.
A little bit about me...I review books for the TLS, The Guardian, and other publications, and I’m a professional violinist. Woman, Eating is my first book, and I’m currently adapting it for TV with Heyday.
Woman, Eating is about Lydia, an English-Japanese-Malaysian vampire, trying to get into the contemporary art world in London. This is a blurb I wrote for the book with my partner, just after finishing the novel:
Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside—the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea, and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the studio she is secretly squatting in. But Lydia can't eat any of this. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London—where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time—is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.
Then there are the humans: the people at the gallery where she interns, the strange men who follow her after dark, and Ben, a goofy-grinned artist she is developing feelings for. Lydia knows that they are her natural prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them.
If Lydia is to find a way to exist in the world, she must reconcile the conflicts within her—between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food and, in turn, humans. Before any of this, however, she must eat.
It maybe sounds odd, but I wasn’t thinking about this being a vampire book when writing. I was just thinking about writing about a person—an artist, struggling to make it in London; a young woman, stuck between girlhood and womanhood; someone who is really, desperately trying to find meaning in life, to understand her ethnic identity and what it is to be human.
Woman, Eating doesn’t really fit into the vampire genre. It isn’t gothic, and isn’t necessarily horror or fantasy. It is literary and grounded in reality, set in contemporary times. Lydia is a very human vampire; she has social anxiety, and binge-watches Buffy and what-I-eat-in-a-day posts on Instagram.
This novel has been said to be for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh, Raven Lailani, and Sally Rooney. I’m aware I’m considered a ‘Millennial novelist’, but I hope that this book will appeal to other generations too. As someone who is Japanese as well as English, I’m of the Heisei generation also. My biggest influences are (as someone who writes on fiction in translation), Murata Sayaka’s Earthlings, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Matsuda Aoko’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, Mishima Yukio’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station; as well as the writing of the artist Nina Efimova, the food writer M.F.K. Fisher, and TV series including Euphoria, Buffy, and Ugly Delicious. I’d love to see Woman, Eating sharing a shelf with any books by Marlon James, Han Kang, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan, and Murata Sayaka.
My biggest inspiration for writing is Lorraine Hansberry—just like Lydia, Hansberry painted and drew self-portraits. For Hansberry, her portraits of herself dressed as a clown reminded her to never take herself too seriously; the marriage of art and literature in Hansberry’s life, Hansberry’s characters and their hopes for the world, and so much more will always be a touchstone for me.
Woman, Eating comes out in April in the US and, as of yet, I haven’t held a solid copy of the American edition, so writing to you all here feels not quite real. To think of my book on the shelf of a library in America feels like a strange and surreal dream.
I grew up in a deprived area in England, where the library was run by volunteers dedicated to keeping people’s sense of hope and community alive. It’s really wonderful to be able to write to you all in America directly. Thank you for everything you are doing.
-Claire
***
Thank you so much, Claire!
Woman, Eating publishes on April 12, 2022.
Download an egalley on Edelweiss+
Download an egalley on NetGalley
