A Certain Hunger

“It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. 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.”

Dorothy describes her greatest pleasures in terms of appetites, but they are all tied to a type of intimacy. She has no shortage of lovers, but sexual gratification is not the pinnacle of intimacy for her. Murder is so much rarer than sex that its scarcity is precious to her. She describes the event of watching men die as something worth pursuing, a gift that most women deny themselves.

“Stories are, like justice or a skyscraper, things that humans fabricate.”

As Dorothy thinks about food in prison, she contemplates the nature of storytelling. She makes no distinction between the stories that people tell themselves and the stories they tell one another. The quote illustrates her amoral approach to life and her cynicism with human nature. She doesn’t trust people because she knows how easy it is to trick people. Because her motives are self-serving, she attributes the same reality to other people who will use her if they can.

“I knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust for me because, even though I didn’t know the precise shape and weight of lust, I knew that lust was power—and I wanted power even then.”

When Dorothy was 12 years old, she imagined a table filled with men who would be her future lovers. She enjoyed the attention, but primarily because the table of men was a visual representation of the power she had. Dorothy didn’t understand yet why she wanted power, but even as a preteen, she wanted control over others.

“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.”

For Dorothy, the tendency to regard women as automatically nurturing, good, selfless peacemakers is willfully ignorant. It requires repression of logic and the denial of evidence. Most women are obviously not like Dorothy, but she claims that many of them are closer to her than society would be comfortable with.

“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.”

Dorothy remembers modeling her behavior on teenage girlfriends. They taught her to be feminine, which gave her this cynical view of femininity. For Dorothy, being feminine is a matter of consumerist packaging. According to her, as long as the outward image of a woman is attractive, people will forgive (or ignore) whatever her internal state may be.

“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.”

Dorothy explains how she chooses the men she sleeps with. She never sleeps with anyone unless she knows she can ruin them if necessary. Initially, Marco presents a unique challenge to her approach. Dorothy has so many secrets that she assumes that everyone else will as well. As a philosophy of life, her outlook is wry and cold. She assumes the worst of people, and because of her worldview, she is rarely proved wrong.

“You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.”

Dorothy calculates before she inserts herself into any situation. She keeps meticulous files on the men she dates because the information will be a more effective armor than any other type of protection. This is typically because the information she uses against men comes from trouble of their own making and secrets they want to keep hidden.

“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.”

Before Dorothy gets her pens in prison, she suffers from an inability to write. Her writing has at least two purposes: It helps her try to make sense of her own actions, as well as to show off her own cleverness to herself. Writing also allows her to leave a record of her existence. In terms of writing, despite her aberrant emotional and moral states, Dorothy’s existence requires the participation of another person—a reader who will serve as a collaborator to perpetuate her continued existence.

“Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman’s love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love. Some people grow together like horrible species of lichen. My parents, I learned, were precisely this kind of symbiotic organism.”

Dorothy believes that some emotions can’t exist in isolation. Her parents had to experience negative emotions to highlight the positives. Dorothy describes their relationship as a horrible codependency in which mutually assured misery is guaranteed. Their growth is not positive, but mutated and parasitic.

“I rather enjoyed being objectified. I like it when men look at me as if they want to devour me. I find it deeply entertaining. It becomes annoying only when they start talking, as if I’d have any interest in anything that comes out of their mouths.”

Dorothy enjoys the benefits that sex with men can provide. Her amusement at men looking at her like she’s food takes on additional weight as the novel progresses, and she literally begins consuming some of her lovers. Dorothy doesn’t even pretend that being interested in what men might say is possible for her, which makes her objectification of them more complete that the objectification implied by their staring.

“Like prison, I'm never getting out of trouble. The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy - because here's the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy moral business, and feel like you are a better person.”

Dorothy occasionally interacts with the reader, using the opportunity to undermine their sense of moral superiority. Anyone who reads Dorothy’s book is choosing to spend their time in the mind of an aberrant, violent, cannibalistic mind, whether for entertainment or escapism. This view allows Dorothy to poke at people’s morality but also to cast herself as a figure of self-improvement. She feels she is so important and influential that even the record of her gruesome crimes can inspire positive feelings.

“Kill one man and you’re an oddity. Kill a few and you’re a legend.”

Dorothy highlights the distinction between a killer of distinction and a run-of-the-mill murderer. Had she not killed several men, she would not have the distinction she does in the media. She is also interested in enlarging her own legend. Dorothy commits to everything she does. She is not interested in being a mere killer. If she had to be caught, she is pleased that she became a killer worth remembering.

“It’s better to live with guilt and remorse than it is to die—just look at how many of us cheat on our partners, our taxes, our diets, our dissertations. And that’s not even with our backs pressed cold against a dead glacier wall. It’s surprisingly easy to overcome moral qualms, if you give in to the appetite.”

Dorothy reveals a key insight into her character. She believes that giving in to one’s appetites is natural, even inevitable. Because she always gives in to her lust for killing, she believes that everyone has lines that they are eventually willing to cross. There is evidence of willingness to cheat everywhere, but there is less evidence of willingness to murder.

“The unapologetically guilty woman sleeps soundly at night.”

Dorothy is confused and bemused by how many women in prison maintain their innocence. Many appear to believe that they will be set free at any time. Dorothy does not feel guilt or remorse, but she accepts that she won’t leave prison and doesn’t deny or justify her role in her imprisonment. She is peaceful because she is fully guilty and refuses to pretend otherwise.

“You can read the statistic that the human body holds twenty-five feet of intestines, but until you see it in all its red-white-and-blue glory, you can’t envision it. Twenty-five feet is a lot of intestines, and I was awash. The pulsating, ferocious smell of innards pressed and throbbed in my throat. I pushed snaking lines of slippery viscera to the side, winding some around the nearby jigsaw. The guts smelled like raw haggis—no, let me rephrase: the air smelled like atavistic lust and honor and jubilance and ecstasy.”

Dorothy can take pleasure in things that would revolt most people. She describes the foul appearance and smell of viscera with a sensual intensity that would not be out of place in a story of erotica. The passage is another reminder that Dorothy is able to experience pleasures that are forbidden to most people, but few will be envious of experiences like the one she describes here.

“Only intellectuals are more gullible than idiots.”

Dorothy is able to mislead people who fancy themselves as intellectuals because they believe they are too smart to be taken advantage of. They are also more likely to trust other intellectuals because they too have supposedly risen above the credulous nature of the uneducated masses. When she is eventually caught, it is because she acts impulsively, leaving her methodical, intellectual approach to murder behind as she tries to attack Emma.

“Beds, for all their vaunted symbolism, are sites of strife. Show me a human who hasn’t silently, stealthily, lain in bed and wished for the sudden horrible death of the person lying next to them, and I’ll show you a liar. We can only take so much intimacy before we close our eyes and pray to our gods for a cerebral hemorrhage.”

Dorothy believes what she says, but she frequently aligns herself with the reader, implicating them in her thoughts and worldview. The difference between Dorothy and most people is that she is willing to take her fantasies one step further. She amplifies the commonplace irritations of relationships and draws conclusions that are literal for her but would be hyperbolic venting to others who expressed similar sentiments.

“‘Eat what you love,’ they say, and I have. But that's facile. It's not merely that I loved Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, and Marco; it's also that I lost them. And it's not merely that I loved and lost them; it's also that I hated them. As much as they were my lovers, they were my enemies, which is more or less all you can hope for from a person with whom you do not share DNA.”

Dorothy describes her lovers as enemies because they gain a level of intimacy with her that not everyone does. Dorothy doesn’t get close to people without knowing enough to ruin them. She must suspect that others do the same. This quote also reveals her low hopes for relationships and her relationship with humanity. She can’t understand why someone she didn’t share DNA with would be anything other than an enemy.

“In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture. With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else—family, lovers, husbands, or children—we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because—and this is the meat of the matter—it’s hard work to be a woman.”

Dorothy explains why Emma will eventually know her better than anyone. When she is around Emma, or the girlfriends of her past, Dorothy can act natural. She does not have to perform what she calls the hard work of being a woman because she is with people who understand the same struggle. Ironically, anything Dorothy says that could be relatable will be quickly undermined by the next violent, misanthropic passage she writes.

“What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgement, and what is hell but the fear of discovery?”

Dorothy is usually calm, even in the midst of her crimes. She is so methodical and patient in most of her preparation that she doesn’t expect to fall under suspicion. This memoir is her version of heaven, in which readers admire the sensationalism of her story and the skill of her writing. Hell is to be discovered and trapped because to be trapped is to lose the power and autonomy to indulge the appetites that comprise her identity.

“We talk about love like it's an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice.”

Dorothy maintains as much control over her life as possible. This is what disturbs her so greatly about falling in love with Andrew. He brings her to the precipice of giving up her choice. It feels as violent and tumultuous to her as falling down an elevator shaft might. While most people celebrate and romanticize the serendipitous possibility of love at first sight, it is the antithesis of Dorothy’s required stability.

“We expect random acts of violence from men. Men are the people who brought us the golden hits of war, genocide, rape, drones, and foot-ball. We do not expect murder, pain, and sadism from women, but we are co-opted idiots. Our unshakeable belief in women’s essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing…It’s as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly and we all did. Some more than others.”

Dorothy is amused by the willing ignorance of society toward violent women. In her view, it is easier to blame men for violence and evil on a larger scale than women because men usually exist in a system that they created to serve themselves. However, Dorothy doesn’t believe this should create a view that women have less potential for evil and violence. The irony is that she believes everyone already knows better because everyone had a mother whose goodness slipped at times.

“In the end, it came down to this: Alex made me a better person, but I didn’t like her. She bored me. I couldn’t imagine forty more years with her. I saw her with my imagination, and I wanted to stab her through the heart with something thrilling and awful. So I killed the relationship instead.”

Dorothy formally admits that she could not bear the thought of becoming a better person for long. A content, domestic version of Dorothy would have been someone she wanted to kill. For Dorothy, the real horror of boredom lies in its relationship to predictability. A stable, domestic relationship with a good partner is the opposite of anticipating her next seduction, murder, exquisite meal, or adventure.