You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of September 2015: Alexandra Kleeman’s mind-bending debut, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, is intoxicating and hallucinatory, full of meditations on food, beauty, relationships, TV and above all, the human body. Get ready to read exquisite, disquieting sentences about your body – “a mouth was a means into a person, but it also offered one of the neatest ways out” – and explore how our consumerist culture dissolves our individual boundaries and makes us hunger to be the same. It’s a strange, surreal world that the three main characters live in – a sort of hyper commercialized and flattened pop-culture world, where employees at the grocery store wear foam heads to appear like their mascot and dads disappear, where TV is watched for commercials and cults run by franchises “believe the quickest route to self-improvement is self-subtraction,” and where food takes on a whole new meaning. The co-opting of identity is at stake in this trippy, incredibly smart novel, yet never has the human body been explained with such intensity, acuity and revelation. Alexandra Kleeman’s ambitious debut will make you crave whatever she writes next.--Al Woodworth