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You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Unavailable
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Unavailable
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Audiobook9 hours

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Written by Alexandra Kleeman

Narrated by Kelly Pruner

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

‘An existential thriller written in prose that points the way to the future’ Zadie Smith

Fight Club for girls’ Vogue

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE

A lives with B.

B seems to be becoming more and more like A.

If A’s boyfriend, C, likes A because A is A, but now B is the same as A, where does that leave A?

And what has happened to the family across the street, who left one afternoon out of nowhere, covered in sheets with holes cut out for the eyes?

‘Comical, malignant and addictive’ Adam Thirlwell

‘As good a debut as I’ve ever read’ Zadie Smith

‘This book will unsettle you; this book will make you feel intensely alive’ Buzzfeed

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 26, 2017
ISBN9780008210861
Unavailable
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Author

Alexandra Kleeman

Alexandra Kleeman has written for the New Yorker, Harper's, Paris Review, Zoetrope, Tin House, VOGUE, and n+1. She received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She was the 2016 winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, and lives in New York.

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Reviews for You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Rating: 3.485074626865672 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

67 ratings4 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    2022 book #16. 2015. A young woman begins having trouble separating her identity from that of her roommate and her boyfriend. Then she fall in with a cult whose purpose is to sever you from your identity. She maybe gets away at the end. Very strange book but oddly compelling.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a catalog of the mundane made nightmarish and surreal. Eating an orange is a visceral act of destruction and consumption. Applying makeup is an absolute negation of the self.

    Sex is dissociative and alien, a study of individual body parts joining and separating in feverish dispassion. Commercials are bizarre tragedies populated with gruesome cartoon imagery.

    Your favorite game show ruins lives and breaks up marriages. The neighbors dressed themselves in bed sheets with holes for their eyes and checked out of society to join a new cult. Your roommate wants to become you so thoroughly that you might no longer exist.

    You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a bit difficult to summarize in any kind of concise fashion, but the back copy certainly tries. The main thing you need to know before reading it is that it isn’t particularly plot-driven and the characters aren’t much more than archetypes.

    The first three-fourths are an episodic, anxious meditation on body image, consumerism and food issues. The last quarter changes gears a bit when the main character decides she has found a solution to her general malaise, and the book loses a bit of its odd, surrealist charm. That last quarter also suffers from a sudden influx of jargon, but the end still mostly sticks the landing.

    My favorite parts were Kleeman’s descriptions of terrifying commercials for a chemical-filled brand of snack cakes. Imagine an existentialist Wile E Coyote who doesn’t just fall but breaks at a spiritual level thanks to the machinations of sentient dessert, and you’ve got the general idea.

    I also appreciated the author’s horrifying descriptions of food and eating even as they made me cringe. Eating is basically never pleasurable in this book; instead, it’s an act of violence against both food and eater.

    I’m honestly not entirely sure why I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I’m not usually patient enough to read weird, arty books, and it was definitely a bit pretentious and overwritten. It’s possible that listening to the audiobook was a big part of why I liked it; in fact, I’m pretty sure I would have gotten bogged down trying to read it in print.

    Accordingly, I’d rate this one as a qualified recommendation. If a rambling, slim story about body image and food issues sounds like it might be worth your time, you’ll probably get a few laughs and/or shudders out of Kleeman’s début.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Having read two books in a row that were surrealist by female authors, I’ve decided to write a combined review comparing my reactions to them. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman and The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips. I will refer to them henceforth as YTCHABLM and TBB. When I began YTCHABLM, I thought it was going to be a contemporary version of Generation X by Douglas Coupland, and it initially threw me off as it evolved unexpectedly from real to surreal, but once I got past that shift, I thoroughly enjoyed it. On the other hand, TBB was a short, tight book with a consistent style, but in total, I disliked it. It struck me as gimmicky and artificial in plot. A game for the author with little true purpose and no meaningful themes. If I was to try to capture these books in a nutshell, I would describe YTCHABLM as The Stranger for Millennials, while TBB was the movie Angel Heart starring Mickey Rourke rehashed from a female perspective.YTCHABLM has something else going for it: humor. It was strung throughout with amusing commentary and dialogue about relationships, television and commercialism, food, religion, and our physical bodies. The title of the book threw me off quite a bit. I expected some kind of satire of the modeling industry, but rather, Kleeman’s take on the body is more about how we are alienated from our physical bodies by culture. Especially women but men too. Through the agricultural/advertising/grocery chains of the world, through the cosmetics industry, through porn and mediated by the contemporary struggle to achieve intimacy in relationships. I did not expect the surreal turn of YTCHABLM…the first quarter of the book is a relatively realistic view of two female slacker roommates and the main character’s relationship with her arrogant slacker boyfriend. Clues begin to pop up in the story that this is going to take a turn away from realism, such as a repeated series of highly elaborate TV commercials that are much too long and intricate to be actual commercials. And too many of them in a series as well. They are almost more morality tales of the artificial food industry, metaphors expressing the means by which media manufactures desire for utterly worthless crap. At the same time, the main character begins to lose touch with her body, with communication and even with common sense. Her character evolves to become after a time, an empty vessel carrying forth only certain behaviors wrought in her by habit. This is where it dovetails for me with The Stranger. And as a side note, she calls her boyfriend C and her roommate B, which reminds me of The Trial by Kafka whose main character is Joseph K. YTCHABLM becomes a modern Existentialist drama/comedy with our character surrendering her identity and personal agency to live in a state of emptiness where nothing really seems to matter.TBB, on the other hand, seems to lack meaningful or profound themes. Which is unexpected, because YTCHABLM comes from a very contemporary moment, while TBB is vaguely more universal in setting (not placed so particularly in our time). Although a few sour notes like repeated mention of the brand “Coca-Cola” marred that. The title of TBB irritated me quite a bit. The plot was a gimmick, and so was the title. The main character gets hired into a job that one would assume is a corporate job in a faceless building in the city. It’s certainly never stated as being a “government” job. The main character is in a data entry/filing capacity but amazingly with her own office. Rather than being labeled a corporate drone, she suddenly calls herself a “bureaucrat,” which as I understand it is a term for a government employee with an implied conservative critique of government, the claim that “all that red tape” is a waste of money for the taxpayer. Also, too many laws get in the way of shit getting done. Yes, our taxes are somewhat complicated, but this is an exaggerated claim simply asserted by an ideology that wants to gut government for private enterprise. So the use of the term “bureaucrat” set up a very particular implication that didn’t sit well with me from the beginning. Then the “Beautiful” reference in the title seems to be about a secondary character? Who is like a slightly overweight Barbie doll? But…why name the book after this secondary character? There was really no reason. A title chosen for greatest draw at the bookstore, I suppose. The wordplay in TBB also was thrown in arbitrarily. Oh the husband and wife like to play on words together? I guess…unfortunately her husband had zero personality so that premise was ungrounded. Another gimmick technique to beef up the literary creds for this empty novel.The surreal aspects of YTCHABLM crept in gradually. I could perhaps quibble with that, but in the end, her approach worked for me. They grew out of the psychology of our culture. By contrast the surreal aspects of TBB hit early on. And they felt utterly contrived. They struck me as the author setting out to “write a surrealist novel” and coming up with a “clever twist” the readers “won’t see coming.” In the end, I saw no point to TBB. It was smoke and mirrors with no substance. On the other hand, YTCHABLM was, in a way, about smoke and mirrors. About the illusions our culture creates distorting our feelings and views about our bodies and our relationships. Kleeman won me over.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    i love these "nightmare i had once when i was a 20something female" books that really piss off literary dudes and appeal to a very specific and bizarro minority of floundering former depressive anorexic art majors and i hope they and their authors take over the world.