If you ask me to think about vampires, Twilight is likely the first thing that would pop into my head, followed by Buffy and TVD, but the list of stories from which to choose is endless and diverse. Vampires have been the subjects of horrors, romances, comedies, speculative fictions, and more for years. The lore from which these monsters originate is equally expansive and varied — from the ancient Babylonian Lilitu to the Chinese Jiangshi — and they have been adapted into fiction all throughout history.
Despite the many variations within vampire stories, the creatures have often tended to present similarly: cold, territorial, strong in their independence, and removed from human connection and emotion. Most vampires depicted in fiction are male, and these traits take on a very masculine sort of heroism, worthy of admiration and love they cannot return. They appear, especially in recent years, as irresistible yet unreachable, utterly captivating but stubbornly aloof and indecipherable to the women who are most often narrating — and consuming — their stories.
Clarie Kohda’s debut novel Woman, Eating completely transforms the figure of the vampire and how readers can interact with it; instead of creating a shroud of mystery and inaccessibility, the state of monstrosity incites an intimate investigation of the body, rendered in an exhaustive detail which is nothing if not viscerally human.
Khoda’s narrator, Lydia, is half vampire and half human. The novel begins with her arrival in London, having just moved there to begin an internship at an art museum in Battersea. After leaving her ailing mother Julie, a full vampire, in a nursing home, Lydia has moved into the basement studio of an artist’s collective. Lydia had been sustained her whole life on pig’s blood from a local butcher her mother knew, but now on her own in a big city, she struggles to find adequate sustenance and finds herself struggling more and more to keep her hunger at bay without feeding off the easiest prey: humans.
Lydia wants to fit into human society — primarily at her job and with the other artists in her new home — as best she can, and this attempt to fit in extends to self-starvation; while Lydia does face obstacles with finding ethical sources of blood, she is also held back by her own reluctance to feed and nourish her body. Her mother has ingrained in her a hatred for the vampiric side of herself, regularly referring to them both as monsters and claiming they had no one but each other, though this only made Lydia resentful of Julie as well as herself. The novel’s primary driving force, and its greatest strength, is the conflict Lydia feels within her own body and mind.
Lydia is an entity of contradictions — both human and monster, both colonizer and colonized, both predator and prey. Despite her inhuman strength and senses, Lydia still presents as a woman and is therefore subject to predation by men. Early in the novel, Lydia is followed by a man on the public train; later she is offered unsolicited dieting advice by a creep in a bookstore; even later she is groped by her boss “like he is trying to prise a piece of me off my body.” While Lydia has struggled her entire life trying to suppress the urge to take the lives of others — to take what she needs to survive — the men around her seem to have no qualms around taking whatever they simply want.
This theme of taking what is not one’s own might seem a fairly obvious one for a story about a vampire, but Kohda ties it in at places throughout the book which are not so obvious until the moment you have read them. At one point, Lydia recalls a theory of her mother’s that pins the origin of their species on the greed of colonialism.
“One man once took so much that was not his — took others’ homes, possessions, livestock, farms, bodies — he stopped being able to nourish his own body with food, the thing it genuinely deserved, and was cursed to only be able to take what was not his for the rest of his life, which was extended to eternity.”
This ties into the tension and internal conflict Lydia feels regarding her mixed ethnic background; she has been raised in Britain, but her mother is of mixed Malaysian and English descent, and her human father was Japanese. Malaysia was colonized by both England and Japan, though more briefly than the former, and Julie’s self-hatred towards herself for being a vampire is tangled up with her cultural trauma and dissonance.
Lydia is rather unique among narrators of vampire novels in the fact that she herself is the only active vampire of the story, and therefore the reader is more privy to her interior emotions and bodily sensations than is typical for the genre. Kohda uses Lydia’s experience of existing in a half-vampire-half-human body to reflect the physical and emotional sensations of mental illnesses like depression. The vampire part of Lydia is a perfect characterization of the sad and angry voices in our heads which feel simultaneously ours and alien.
“It’s like my body is a puppet. I wonder which side of me, the demon or the human, is the one that wants me to go to the gallery and is forcing me up. It’s one of them, while the other drags her feet.”
Though I don’t have a vampire inside of me begging for me to suck some blood, this sensation resonates with my own experiences with mental illness. It can sometimes be hard to know which impulses and desires are organic and healthy and which are a form of depression; sometimes staying home all day is genuinely what I need, and other times it is only going to perpetuate my low period and what would truly help me would be to get out and take a walk. And the times when I’m in the thick of it, when I could really use a walk or a shower or a meal, are the times when these things feel the most impossible.
“Whenever there is something planned in my life — either meeting a friend, going on a school or uni trip, going for a walk, or, like today, starting an internship — when it actually comes to the day I have to go through with the plan, it goes from being something I’m excited about to something I dread… Right now, I don’t want to go to the Otter, even though I’ve planned the route meticulously in my mind, and feel prepared. I want to stay here on my concrete floor and look at the ceiling. I definitely don’t want to meet people. The idea of it, from the perspective of where I am now, alone in this room, is strange and feels completely unnatural.”
Lydia’s low periods are brought on by hunger, but like with depression, it is not a normal hunger. It is a hunger for life, for emotion, sensation, inspiration, passion, love, all those things which flow through our human veins.
Kohda also uses vampirism to emulate another mental struggle through Lydia’s relationship with her mother Julie, who suffers from Alzheimer’s — or at least, the closest a vampire can experience to it. Unlike the unsuspecting doctors, Lydia diagnoses her mother’s condition as a “forgetting of who she is and sometimes even what she is.” She attributes her mother’s mental decline to the loss of her teeth, caused by a gum disease left over from when she was a human child centuries ago:
“In our teeth is an ability to end life, which also means that every day when we do not, we are exerting the power we have to preserve life. With her teeth gone, so went my mum’s identity as a vampire who chose not to use them.”
This correlation between the loss of capability and the loss of identity was a startling reflection of my own tangential experience with Alzheimer’s. My grandmother, a woman who had always lived for nothing more than to take care of her family, has developed Alzheimer’s (the actual kind, not the vampiric kind). Because of the disease, she is no longer physically or mentally capable of caring for herself and others in the way she is used to, and whenever this loss of capability becomes apparent, it only furthers her confusion. Kohda was able to represent this strange and often inarticulable experience in a tangible way by relating it to Julie’s vampirism, in turn allowing me, and my mother with whom I shared this part of the book, to look at my grandmother’s experience in a new and more empathetic way.
Though her experience of life and existence is different than any real human, Lydia is incredibly relatable to readers, particularly female ones, because of the intimate detail in which these experiences are presented. By rendering Lydia’s experiences in such extreme and raw detail, Kohda makes her a more empathetic and relatable character than most other vampires who have appeared in fiction. In comparison to the masculine ideals of independence and self-sufficiency, empathy is a more feminine way of relating to others, and repurposing traditionally patriarchal tropes to better reflect feminine experiences and voices is a particularly powerful form of myth-making.
Woman, Eating was authored by Claire Kohda (pictured) and published by Harper Via in 2022.
Eve Annajane Writes, LLC 