Fiction

‘Your body, my chow’

Two novels about female appetite

by Eleanor Spencer-Regan •

March 2025, no. 473

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Brazen, $34.99 pb, 289 pp

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Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary

Scribe, $29.99 pb, 256 pp

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Fiction

‘Your body, my chow’

Two novels about female appetite

by Eleanor Spencer-Regan •

March 2025, no. 473

In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word ‘hangry’, defined as ‘bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger’. Incidentally, the word ‘mansplain’ was also added in 2018. If you are not familiar with this one, I am sure there is a man nearby who will be happy to enlighten you. Reading Monika Kim’s début novel, The Eyes Are the Best Part, I began to wonder whether we may now need a word to describe the inverse state of being ‘hungry as a result of being bad-tempered or irritable’. Some onomatopoeic portmanteau of ‘rage’ and ‘ravening’, perhaps?

Eleanor Spencer-Regan

Eleanor Spencer-Regan is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and the Principal of Janet Clarke Hall, Australia’s first residential college for women. She is a former Frank Knox Memorial Scholar at Harvard University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary British and American poetry, and children’s and Young Adult literature. Publications include Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2023) and American Poetry since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).