You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine: A Novel

An intelligent and madly entertaining debut novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass that is at once a missing-person mystery, an exorcism of modern culture, and a wholly singular vision of contemporary womanhood from a terrifying and often funny voice of a new generation.A woman known only by the letter A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality show called That’s My Partner! A eats (or doesn’t) the right things, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials—particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that only exists in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a news-celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up his local Wally Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.Meanwhile B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction, and becomes indoctrinated by a new religion spread throughout a web of corporate franchises, which moves her closer to the decoys that populate her television world, but no closer to her true nature.

Amazon.com Review

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

Paris Review, Staff Pick

“The smartest, strangest novel I’ve read in a while.”

Vanity Fair

“This debut novel by future superstar Alexandra Kleeman will be the thing to be seen reading this summer. Pick it up if you want to up your summer cool factor . . . . .Very funny, perfectly weird, a hyperintelligent commentary on a culture obsessed with you and fame.”

Los Angeles Magazine

“A clever satire of our culture’s ever intensifying obsession with health, diet, and body image.”

Vogue.com

“Alexandra Kleeman has written Fight Club for girls.”

The Atlantic

“Kleeman plays with an idea of empathy so extreme that it collapses on itself: What if there is no essential difference between humans worth bridging? The result might be an insatiable hunger for something that reminds us of our distinctness.”

Marie Claire

“Don’t be fooled by the sassy title-the cravings that lurk beneath the surface in this completely original debut will haunt what a body means to you indefinitely.”

New York Times Book Review

“A powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation.”

New York Times

“The symbols of modern anomie in this novel are familiar (soulless supermarkets, insane mass entertainments, etc.), but Ms. Kleeman has a singular, off-kilter style, and a distinct vision of the absurd horrors that can come with being trapped in a body.”

Buzzfeed

“At once eerie and strange and beautiful, an incisive commentary on contemporary culture and womanhood.”

Slate

“Excellent . . . Sprinkled with detailed summaries of invented advertisements, the book describes a consumer landscape just on the far side of plausible. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a story about realizing you’re hungry and trying to find out what for.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A fever dream of modern alienation. . . . not really like any other, but could be described as a blend of the nightmarish disassociation of DeLillo’s White Noise and the phantasmagoria of Bergman’s Persona. A challenging novel, but undoubtedly one with something to say.”

Huffington Post

“Her darkly satirical debut lays bare the ravages of advertising-fueled culture and consumerism, through a purposefully distorted version of our reality. Fans of DeLillo, Pynchon and Shteyngart are advised to take note.”

and worth the ride.”

“This is not a breezy summer read, but it’s cerebral, sharp, funny

Chicago Tribune

“A satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.”

New York Magazine

“Funny yet chilling...might make you see the mundane routines of everyday life a little differently.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Kleeman is, clearly, writing in a postmodernist mode. Her ambition is huge, and, at the level of the sentence, she’s amazing.”

Buzzfeed

“At once eerie and strange and beautiful, Alexandra Kleeman’s brilliant debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine immediately distinguishes itself with its originality and unique voice.”

Booklist

“hysterical realism” of Ben Marcus and Tom Perrotta, bringing a refreshingly feminist frame to the postmodern conversation. While ambitious in scope and structure, sharp humor and brisk storytelling ground the existential angst in Kleeman’s page-turning, entertaining performance.”

especially while being a woman.”

“Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel is brilliant, incisive, and exactly how to send off summer with a bang. Written masterfully, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a biting cultural indictment on what we see, think, do, and eat

AskMen.com

“Writing in the same tradition as writers like DeLillo and Pynchon, writers who can take the world and shift it so that it to reveal all of its innate strangeness, Kleeman has crafted a darkly funny and deep cutting novel.”

Rivka Galchen

“My strong preference would be to eat this book and be reconstituted by its intelligence. But with deep gratitude still I will settle for just getting to read this ingenious novel which has eaten up our whole culture…and transubstantiated it into wry, brilliant, undeniable literary truth.”

Ben Marcus

“Alexandra Kleeman is one of the sharpest and smartest young writers I’ve read - ambitious, promising, brilliant. She can be strange and very funny as well, and when I read her work I have the strong suspicion that I’m reading the literature of the future.”

Catherine Lacey

“Captivating and full of gorgeous perversity, the insights and wit of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine dissolved almost everything I thought I knew about being a body.”

Kathleen Alcott

“As incisive about our dark cultural obsessions as she is compassionate towards the individuals who fall prey to them, Alexandra Kleeman is a terrifying and elegant talent you will not soon forget.”

Teddy Wayne

“A brilliant and strange portrait of dystopian consumption--of food, television, and one another--YTCHABLM would be purely unsettling if it weren’t also so gorgeously written and funny. Thankfully, we too can have a mind like Alexandra Kleeman’s, or the simulacrum of it, through this stupendous debut.”

Benjamin Hale, author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“We live in a reality so sick and absurd already that satire has a hard time one-upping it, but Kleeman has done so in a way that is at once moving, haunting, hilarious, and surpassingly strange. It’s a novel about starvation that I read with voracious hunger.”

Emily Gould

“Eerie and resonant, Alexandra Kleeman’s riveting novel grapples with the essential creepiness of living in human skin. Like watching a body horror film, the experience of reading this book disassembles the familiar and makes everything new and strange. You might never eat another orange.”

From the Back Cover

A woman known only as A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality dating show called That's My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials— particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that exists only in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a local celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up a Wally's Supermarket's entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.Meanwhile, B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C's pornography addiction. Maybe something like what's gotten into her neighbors across the street, the family who's begun "ghosting" themselves beneath white sheets and whose garage door features a strange scrawl of graffiti: he who sits next to me, may we eat as one.An intelligent and madly entertaining novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass, Alexandra Kleeman's unforgettable debut is a missing-person mystery told from the point of view of the missing person; an American horror story that concerns sex and friendship, consumption and appetite, faith and transformation, real food and reality television; and, above all, a wholly singular vision of modern womanhood by a frightening, "stunning" (Conjunctions), and often very funny voice of a new generation.

About the Author

Alexandra Kleeman has written for the New Yorker, Harper's, Paris Review, Zoetrope, Tin House, VOGUE, and n+1. She received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She was the 2016 winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, and lives in New York.

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