Publishers Weekly
★ 05/11/2015
Kleeman's debut novel is a fever dream of modern alienation following A, a young woman living in an unnamed city with B, her roommate, who has a tendency to bite people when she feels cornered. A has a boyfriend, C, who makes things "suddenly, instantaneously normal, just by explaining them." But A's dull proofreading job and her idle time spent watching Shark Week and porn with C start fading away, and events grow increasingly hallucinatory as B begins trying to look more like A (including cutting off her braid and giving it to A), and C becomes more distant. This is a world in which a man buys a supermarket's entire stock of veal, and something called Disappearing Dad Disorder runs rampant. But the strange becomes increasingly ordinary as it's filtered through A's quest to efface herself: "I looked forward to fully becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself." In the third act, a religious cult in which members wear ghostlike sheets takes center stage; members subsist entirely on a synthetic dessert snack called Kandy Kakes and are instructed to "misremember" (erase their own memories through meditative concentration). Kleeman's story is 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. It's a testament to Kleeman's ability that the text itself blurs and begins to run together—that it seems composed more of a uniform, ephemeral language than of a series of discrete scenes. This is a challenging novel, but undoubtedly one with something to say. One wonders what Kleeman will come up with next. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Aug.)
Benjamin Hale
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bustle
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 — especially while being a woman.
Booklist
Absurdist observations evoke masters like DeLillo and Pynchon, as well as the “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.
New York Magazine
Funny yet chilling...might make you see the mundane routines of everyday life a little differently.
Chicago Tribune
A satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.
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.
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.
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.
New York Post
This is not a breezy summer read, but it’s cerebral, sharp, funny - and worth the ride.
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.
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.
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.
New York Times Book Review
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation.
Vogue.com
Alexandra Kleeman has written Fight Club for girls.
Los Angeles Magazine
A clever satire of our culture’s ever intensifying obsession with health, diet, and body image.
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.
Paris Review
The smartest, strangest novel I’ve read in a while.
Kirkus Reviews
2015-06-07
Identity, abjection, and consumerism are the primary concerns of this debut novelist. A is worrying that she and her roommate, B, are becoming indistinguishable. A's problem with her boyfriend, C, is an inversion of the aforementioned dilemma: what C sees when he looks at A is what he wants A to be—what she wants herself to be, but only sometimes, and not so much lately. Kleeman is, clearly, writing in a postmodernist mode. Her ambition is huge, and, at the level of the sentence, she's amazing. "I had hoped happiness would be warmer, cozier, more enveloping. More exciting, like one of the things that happen on TV to TV people instead of the calming numb of watching it happen." Those are terrific sentences, and there's writing just like that on nearly every page. At the narrative level, though, this novel barely moves. Even after A joins a discount-store cult, her crises and epiphanies are pretty much repetitions—occasionally gorgeous repetitions, to be fair—of those that have come before. Existential paralysis is a great subject for short fiction but a more difficult one for a novel.
