47 pages • 1 hour read
Chelsea G. SummersA Certain Hunger
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Corpse Reviver # 2”
Dorothy Daniels recalls drinking a cocktail called the Corpse Reviver #2 at the NoMad Hotel bar in 2013 in New York. Citing an 1871 edition of The Gentleman’s Table Guide, she describes the drink’s origins. Like many hangover cures and cocktails, the Corpse Reviver #2 came about during Prohibition.
Dorothy met Casimir, a stockbroker and poet, at the NoMad bar. They had sex in his room soon after meeting.
As she writes in her prison cell in the present, Dorothy wonders why she killed Casimir. During and after her trial, the tabloids called her the “MILF Killer” and shared the lurid details of the murder (15).
Dorothy took Casimir to a stranger’s house on Fire Island. She picked him up at the ferry, and they cooked and ate duck together. After rhapsodizing about the versatility and taste of duck fat in the present, Dorothy describes Casimir’s murder. During sex, she impulsively stabbed him with an ice pick in the throat, in the eyes, and between the ribs. She then burned his body in the stranger’s house before going to a friend’s house nearby and watching television.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Roast Parsnips”
Dorothy describes the mundaneness of prison. She behaves well so that she can have writing instruments as a privilege. Dorothy hates prison food and claims that she would kill to eat something good. She frequently fantasizes about food while shelving books in the prison library.
At age 12, Dorothy imagined sending her past and future lovers an invitation. She would sit at the head of the table and observe them, relishing their shared lust for her. Even at 12, she understood that lust was power, and she always wanted power.
Dorothy’s reputation as a serial killer protects her in prison, where she is more likely to be pestered by psychology students than other inmates. Dorothy enjoys the interviews, admitting to changing her behavior while being observed. Using the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV, as her study guide, Dorothy answers their questions in whichever way might prolong the interviews.
Dorothy once took a psychiatric disability test and agreed with the results; she identifies as a psychopath. She writes that women psychopaths are particularly fascinating and rare to both the mental health professional and the audience. She doesn’t believe that such women are as rare as people think; she believes that these women simply fake normalcy better than men.
Dorothy’s father visits occasionally, and her sister has come twice. Her brother writes to her. Dorothy forbids a woman named Emma from visiting. Emma writes occasionally, but Dorothy usually throws her letters away.
Chapter 3 Summary: “French Fries”
Dorothy accidentally became a food critic for the magazine Noir when she sat next to Andrew Gotien at a restaurant. After having sex, he offered her a job. She asked for $4,000 per column. Dorothy believes that she was born “to give voice to food’s consumption” (30).
She explains her history with food through her Francophile mother, who cooked skillfully and grew much of her own produce. Her father was an unassuming man who wrote advertising copy. Dorothy describes herself as her normal family’s secret.
Dorothy remembers her childhood girlfriends as people who taught her to disguise herself as normal—modeling proper behavior and giving her opportunities to mimic their laughter, style, and moods. Her friends taught her how to be feminine, even though Dorothy finds femininity to be a matter of marketing and feels limited by modern notions of femininity. She concludes the chapter with a brief description of losing her virginity to a fry cook after watching him work.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Tofu”
Emma Absinthe, a famous agoraphobic painter, writes to Dorothy in prison. Emma lives in isolation, painting self-portraits of herself as famous men. When Dorothy met her at Pennistone College, Emma was still named Joanne Correa. They were first-year roommates and hated each other instantly, causing Joanne to find another room.
Dorothy describes protecting her reputation at college while also sleeping with at least 50 men. Her strategy was simple: “I didn’t fuck anyone I couldn’t ruin” (41). She kept a blackmail file in a storage shed. Dorothy also learned to pick locks, which helped her gain access to information. She feels that college prepared her for adult life in Boston.
Dorothy describes her need to write. For two weeks, she couldn’t write in prison because another inmate stabbed a guard with a pen. The rumor was that the guard groped the woman during pat-downs. Dorothy sympathizes with her, but she feels she loses her identity when she can’t write.
In Boston, in 1986, Dorothy unexpectedly saw a woman drive a bulldozer over some vases shaped like vulvas. When the police arrested the woman and stopped her demonstration, Dorothy recognized Joanne, who was now an activist demonstrating under the name Tender deBris. Dorothy bailed her out of jail for reasons that she never understood, but they didn’t maintain contact afterward.
Dorothy was a lifestyle columnist at the Boston Phoenix. She hated the frivolous column, but she enjoyed the writing, which paid well and helped her to network. She used her contacts to find Joanne again after she became the artist Emma Absinthe. Dorothy writes that, while her relationship with Emma might be her greatest accomplishment, it is also a source of great sadness.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
In this section, Dorothy Daniels presents herself as a character who enjoys sensual pleasures above anything else—the arts, fine dining, and sex—highlighting the theme of Desire and Consumption. Dorothy is also a convicted murderer who identifies as a “psychopath” and makes no attempt to dispute her crimes. She spent her youth learning the personalities of other women in order to blend in and hide her murderous impulses and long-self-perceived identity as an outsider. Dorothy is also a paid storyteller, a journalist, and her matter-of-fact rendering of heinous events and her indifference to the lives of others juxtaposes the comedic tone of her narrative. Further, she is engaging and open and does not offer the persona one might expect of a convicted killer, but herein lies a key element to the narrative: Anyone can be dangerous, and women are, according to Dorothy, simply better at hiding this.
Additionally, Dorothy examines the Power Dynamics in Relationships when she shares her childhood fantasy of inviting all of her lovers to gather, where she would relish in the power of being desired, signaling to a long-standing perception of power as the ultimate pleasure. Further, during her time with the Boston Phoenix, she disliked the work but enjoyed the contacts and networking it provided her, particularly for sexual partners. This speaks to a kind of power exchange within sex, asserting that the acquisition of lovers is a social currency for Dorothy. Through sex, Dorothy feels a sense of power and control over men, but she also demonstrates a keen awareness of the way in which women are shamed for their sexuality. In college, she kept a blackmail file in case any of her sexual partners tried to expose their relationships. As such, sex, power, and perceptions of femininity and womanhood are all interwoven within Dorothy’s mind. However, as a result of this interplay, as well as her self-identification as a person with a psychiatric disability, Dorothy seems unable to have a true romantic relationship. So, when Dorothy admits to complex emotions toward Emma, it is striking in that it is presented as a platonic relationship that deeply impacted Dorothy. While she appears unaffected by the men she has murdered, she is, even in the present, very affected by Emma, foreshadowing a deeper look into this relationship and creating a parallel between platonic and sexual relationships. Indeed, Dorothy maintains that she is unsure of why she bailed Emma out of jail, just as she maintains that she is unsure of why she killed Casimir. This impulsivity is key to her character.
Further, Dorothy’s brief description of her time with Casimir demonstrates the theme of The Intersections of Food, Sex, and Death: Dorothy cooked duck with Casimir and, on impulse, stabbed him with an ice pick during sex. She reflects, “It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. […] Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege” (18). Dorothy does not view murder as a negative thing, and she certainly expresses no remorse. Instead, it is presented as a “privilege.” Where Dorothy seems strengthened by her murders, she appears weakened by the friendship and betrayal foreshadowed with Emma.
Dorothy’s chaotic wit is not merely for show. She explains, “Writers say this kind of thing all the time, but to me writing is like drinking water or eating food. Writing sustains me. I don’t know who I am if I don’t write. More important, you don’t know who I am. If I don’t tell my story, it’s as if I’ve died” (44). Dorothy is a chameleon, shifting personas and behaviors as necessary to get what she wants. In comparison, her writing is more of a concrete identity. Once she writes something down, the words don’t change. The reader gets to interpret her unchanging prose at that point. It’s easy to change a story verbally or to lie about one’s identity when meeting someone new: “Stories are, like justice or a skyscraper, things humans fabricate” (22).
Writing from prison, Dorothy uses the natures of men and women to discuss the theme of Power Dynamics in Relationships. She writes about seeing her young female friends as models of femininity: “I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty” (35). Even as a 12-year-old, she understood that lust could be the tool that gave her that comforting power, in a similar way that junk food comforts those who consume it, even as the indulgence in their desire damages their bodies.
Dorothy’s lust for power is made much clearer by her description of information gathering on the men she sleeps with: “My philosophy has always been that if you look hard enough, you will find something wicked on nearly every man—everyone has at least one devastating piece of information” (41). The men she sleeps with allow themselves—or she allows them—to think that they have seduced a woman with charm, masculinity, and skill, but Dorothy knows who they are really dealing with: “You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway” (26).
Dorothy’s frequent remarks about women being the fairer, better, gentler sex also give her a chance to talk about protections that are more useful than condoms or pepper spray: information. She says, “You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does” (41).
All of these facts about Dorothy’s character make the evolution of her relationship with Emma more interesting and confusing. Emma—the current iteration of Joanne—gives Dorothy a foil. Emma can’t be tricked, and she isn’t willing to give Dorothy the upper hand. She is able to shift identities as quickly as Dorothy, and with even more certainty. She changes her name at least twice during the novel and appears to thrive on a certain level of distress.
