A Certain Hunger

Description

From prison, celebrated food writer Dorothy Daniels recounts the appetite-driven life that made her both a discerning critic and a convicted serial killer. Her memories move between Manhattan and Italy, tracing an apparently idyllic childhood, a successful culinary career, and an increasingly uncompromising embrace of food, sex, travel, and violence. Dorothy describes meals and crimes with the same exacting attention, controlling her own story even as confinement limits her world. Her cultivated voice turns confession into an argument about who is permitted to possess hunger, cruelty, and power. Darkly comic and deliberately provocative, the novel uses Dorothy’s terrifying self-acceptance to confront assumptions about women’s capacity for violence.

Themes