Darrin Doyle’s The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo dissects the six members of the Mapes family, displaying the contents of their bellies as evidence of the monstrous deed of the youngest daughter, Audrey. Presented as biographical nonfiction, Doyle pieces the novel together from diaries of Audrey’s sister, McKenna, and fake news reports. It is the tale of a girl so hungry for love that she eats the city of Kalamazoo.

Audrey’s story begins when McKenna experiments with her baby sister’s strange appetite by secretly feeding her cartons of crayons. Eventually, the entire family discovers and enables her habit, except the austerely religious Grandma Pencil, who regards Audrey’s pica as evil. However, it isn’t only Audrey that has an eating disorder. Let’s examine their stomachs: the emotionally absent parents down dreams and pills; Grandma Pencil fills her belly with snacks to stave off a “debilitating terror of hunger” (68); Toby eats his body weight to expand it; McKenna regurgitates, chews, and repeats. They can’t love each other. One night during their bath, McKenna sees in Audrey’s eyes “an invitation to love, or pity… a question or plea, something that made McKenna confused and afraid” (32). Doyle explores the ideology behind eating disorders: food in place of love, food in place of family, the need and desire to fill. Indeed, Audrey’s is not a crying out but a sucking in - devouring Kalamazoo to fill what‘s empty.

Doyle employs grotesque food imagery and anecdotes to illustrate the loss of control. Kalamazoo opens with spoiled toddler Audrey sliding in butter on the kitchen floor and letting the dog lick cream cheese from her ear. Food is as basic a need as love; when a need is unobtainable, we overcompensate with a different one. With the rise of the fast food generation came a new monster: the super-sized meal for a quick fix. Food is seemingly innocuous, eaten everyday, yet it has become ugly in our society. Audrey’s is a “disgusting appetite” (151). Readers going in with dreams of sugarplums will emerge singing “great big globs of greasy, grimy, gopher guts…”

Borrowing from magical realism, Doyle makes the fantastic ordinary and the ordinary fantastic. This absurdity exposes the forces behind one family’s dysfunction. Meanwhile, Doyle’s realistic, descriptive language makes feasible a universe in which Kalamazoo may be eaten. As Audrey reduces the city to pebbles, shards, nuts and bolts, Doyle renders the world of Audacious Audrey in words as brightly colored as Nerds candy. The narrator McKenna’s point-of-view is simultaneously sympathetic and backhandedly scathing. At times her voice breaks third-person omniscient; for example, her pitiful cry, “she was my sister” (237). McKenna loves Audrey, but begrudges her attitude, oddity, and attention from their mother. Alternately, McKenna’s resentment and clumsy love rise and fall, like the food she chews, never rendered nor swallowed. McKenna only ruminates. Their relationship ends in ruin with McKenna’s scornful double entendre: “We all love you” (233).

An interview in the Kalamazoo Gazette reveals that Doyle penned Kalamazoo with the need “to destroy something.” He writes ruthlessly, candidly, and sometimes offensively. Chapter twelve is especially aggressive toward Christianity as the father, Murray, rattles off religious jokes to jab at Grandma Pencil. Be warned that Doyle’s characters are unapologetically unlikable, and they never reach redemption. Some readers may be too angry with them to care about how they end. But then, what separates readers from Audrey? Though the Mapeses are terrible, they are tragic. Though Audrey is a monster, she is a pathetic monster. When her body is discovered “blowing down the middle of Main street like an empty plastic bag,” try not to mutter “poor little…”

The best description comes from Doyle’s own mouth; Kalamazoo is “dark, humorous, tragic, and scary.” It’s a comic monster story, a story about family members who don’t hate each other, they just hate “the idea” of each other (4). Grab a spoon, a straw, or unhinge your jaw and suck up this delectable meal for the modern reader.