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47 pages 1 hour read

Chelsea G. Summers

A Certain Hunger

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 9 Summary: “Banana Bread”

Dorothy walked around Manhattan while Andrew’s buttocks were roasting at home. She scattered parcels of his skin in dumpsters behind restaurants. Two killings made her a serial killer, according to updated FBI criteria.

She killed Giovanni in December of 2000. The only fear she felt was about being caught. She was more careful with Andrew’s murder, which was satisfying, but it also annoyed her that no one could appreciate it. She wanted to kill him again, but, of course, he was already dead. Andrew’s death made her work harder on her second book, Voracious. She spent six weeks traveling and eating across America, which helped her with the loss of having killed him and never being able to do it again.

In 2008, Dorothy met with her Eat & Drink editor, Chloe James. Dorothy thought the purpose of the meeting was to end her sabbatical after finishing the manuscript for Voracious. Instead, Chloe let her go because Dorothy was too expensive. It was the most humiliating moment of her life, until her arrest.

After being laid off, Dorothy baked banana bread compulsively while planning various ways to destroy the magazine. Emma read about the firing and called Dorothy to tell her to get back to work.

Chapter 10 Summary: “Torta ai Fichi e Limone”

Years earlier, Dorothy bailed Emma out of jail for reasons that remain unclear to her. They didn’t trust each other, but she writes that they “loved each other with the ferocity borne of a twisted shared history” (121). Emma became a recluse after her first panic attack, which happened soon after her Boston arrest following her demonstration.

Emma instantly committed herself to creating a life based on privacy. She became a recluse, discarded the named Tender deBris, and became Emma Absinthe. Emma also became a phone sex operator, painting while she kept men on the phone. Years later, she had a gallery show of self-portraits from famous children’s books. In each picture, she gave famous literary characters her own mid-orgasm face. She earned enough money to move into an upscale neighborhood. Dorothy now compares Emma to Emily Dickinson because people have to come to her if they want to see her.

Dorothy remade herself as a food writer two weeks after her firing. With Voracious, she would reveal her appearance. This was significant because, as a restaurant critic, she always wore a disguise. The new hustle for the book energized her. In 2009, she went sailing with Gil to a house on Shelter Island.

She describes the positive aspects of their relationship before revealing that, while they were on Gil’s boat, she made a meal that pushed Gil into anaphylactic shock. Then, she cut out his tongue and pushed him overboard.

Chapter 11 Summary: “Lingua con le Olive”

Dorothy quotes George Bataille: “A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism” (131). The quote allegedly appears in a book called Erotism: Death and Sensuality, but Dorothy hasn’t read it because it wouldn’t make it through the prison’s censors. Each inmate in good standing can have 25 approved books.

When Gil began having a seizure during their meal on the boat, she thought his death and her subsequent butchering would be easy. She had thrown his EpiPen overboard so there would be no way to save him. As he convulsed, she grabbed his legs and heaved him over the edge, but he caught himself by one hand, which she then hit with the boat’s winch. After stabbing his index finger with a knife, he fell into the water.

Dorothy gives a brief history of Luminol, the chemical used to detect blood by forensic teams. The blood on his boat made her nervous. She got into the water and put a life jacket on Gil while figuring out how to remove his tongue; the shock made it swell, forcing her to cut it out through his throat.

Dorothy describes her group therapy sessions, which are led by a woman named Joyce. They serve as a break from the mundaneness of prison life. An inmate named Luciana shares that she burned a house down after she caught her foster mother having sex with a UPS guy. When Joyce asks Dorothy how the story makes her feel, she says she feels bad that Luciana had to experience it and hopes she can learn to forgive herself by forgiving her foster mother.

After killing Gil, Dorothy realized the Coast Guard could find his boat with GPS. If they found the body too soon, it would be obvious that a knife was involved. She called the Coast Guard to report him missing herself. Gil’s body was found five days later. She wonders why she killed Gil and thinks it might have been a form of retaliation for Chloe firing her.

Chapter 12 Summary: “Silage”

Dorothy returned to Italy in the spring of 2011 and found that Marco was being faithful to his wife. At age 50, Dorothy was tired of seduction. She went to Italy after pitching a story on Marco—and his Jewish butchering empire—to Gourmand.

Prior to interviewing him, she saw the butchery grounds and each critical piece of Marco’s empire. She knew that she wanted to murder and eat him. Now she boasts that, aside from her books, she considers killing Marco her finest achievement. She planned it more extensively than her previous killings because she wanted Marco’s death to look like a murder.

Dorothy and Marco toured his farms in Cremona and Lombardia. She had decided not to kill him if he had sex with her. Dorothy learned about the rigid intricacies of kosher butchering on library computers to avoid any patterns or bits of evidence in her search history.

They went to Livorno, where Dorothy was annoyed that Marco had a chaperone. She enjoyed wondering if he would succumb to the urge to touch her. She stayed just as distant as he, allowing him space to make his choice. Marco’s slaughterhouse door held a quote from the activist Temple Grandin: “Nature is cruel but we don’t have to be” (158). Dorothy then explains the intricacies of the shochet ceremony that accompanies the kosher slaughtering of an animal, but she points out that, no matter how elegant the ceremony, killing animals is all the same.

She admires part of Marco’s business strategy: Whenever something happens to a kill that isn’t kosher, Marco sold that meat to the goyim (non-Jewish) customers. As she watched Marco work, she wanted to have sex with him on the floor. But she couldn’t because given the rules she set, that wouldn’t allow her to kill him.

Chapters 9-12 Analysis

In this section, the exploration of Dorothy’s murders demonstrates the Power Dynamics in Relationships, as killing maintains Dorothy’s sense of power. Gil’s murder is almost a physical comedy that strips him of any power: Dorothy carefully planned to poison Gil and remove his tongue, but she didn’t account for his weight or the particulars of removing his tongue, making the murder messy. In this sense, Gil’s murder is the exact opposite of Dorothy’s foreshadowed butchery of Marco. Gil’s death shows that Dorothy’s planning is occasionally lacking, and her faith in her ability to improvise may be part of what landed her in prison. This section also explores Dorothy’s desire to kill Andrew again, as well as her disappointment in the fact that she could only do it once. Interestingly, Dorothy expressed disgust at Andrew’s traditional family life, and she was so angry when he took up with her assistant, and later wife, that she reported him to the IRS. This suggests that, more than wanting to eat Andrew, Dorothy wanted to punish him repeatedly for both his betrayal and his conformity to family life.

With regard to The Intersections of Food, Sex, and Death, the elaborate ritual of the sochet allowed Dorothy to admire Marco’s appreciation for the preparation of food, which, in turn, aroused her. Marco’s method of butchery created a need for greater aesthetic appeal in Dorothy’s own killings, particularly the murder of Marco himself. Indeed, an element of exhibitionism crept into her designs, as if the pleasure of killing—and getting away with it—was no longer quite so satisfying. Dorothy’s anonymous kills did not give anyone the chance to flatter her or treat her with importance through an investigation. Dorothy wanted her murders to be almost like art, leaving people afraid, shocked, and emotional. However, Dorothy had no desire to be caught for her murders; she wanted only to be admired for the skill she exhibited in her methods of killing. This foreshadows the degree of unpleasantness and agitation she’ll experience when Detective Wasserman starts closing in. Indeed, Dorothy has long been a cool and relaxed character, even as she has described horrific events: her looming arrest, which is inevitable given that she is already imprisoned, will offer a completely alternate view to her character, proving her to be more emotional than has been allowed to be known thus far.

These chapters provide more details about Emma, showing how well she and Dorothy work as both foils and allies. The description of her latest art project is morbidly funny, disturbing, and indicative of her character. Emma’s self-centeredness has a different manifestation than that of Dorothy: Emma distorts classic characters, sexualizing them and making herself the focus of art. Contemplating a character like the Lorax climaxing sexually eventually made Emma wealthy and won her a massive fanbase. Dorothy is also an admirer of the arts and sees in herself the arts of manipulation, illusion, and murder. She believes that there is an art to her past murders, but the precise murder of Marco was her masterpiece. Additionally, both women can be interpreted as unconventional feminists: Emma bulldozed vulvas and found success by reimagining classic work through her own sexualization, while Dorothy killed men to maintain power over them and wrote professionally to expand her own network. Both women used sex and art as a way to gain control and push back against rigid societal norms that traditionally place women in roles of subservience.

As a point of contrast between the two women, Emma operated from her solitude, but she was able to perform her greatest thrills under her own identity—or at least, the one she has chosen for the moment. Dorothy was not able to indulge in the same luxury of using her name until she came out as an author, rather than as a food critic who was constantly in disguise.

As the novel enters its final chapters, the sources of greatest narrative tension are how Dorothy will get caught and the nature of Marco’s death. Dorothy’s need for acknowledgement, combined with her growing sense of self-confidence, have placed her in a more vulnerable position than she knows. Additionally, the major remaining point of resolution and clarity is the mystery of Emma’s unopened letters and the connection between the women, which Dorothy previously described as both pleasurable and painful in a rare acknowledgment of lasting emotion over loss.

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