TW: Grief, abusive relationships, eating disorders
The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls is an outstanding novel that deals with very difficult, triggering topics: parental loss/grief, abusive relationships and eating disorders. The narration is shared by the three adult Cochran sisters over the period of about a month. During that time, the reader witnesses a family spiraling downward but fighting to stay together in the face of powerfully destructive forces.
The novel opens with Althea, the eldest Cochran sister, in jail for committing fraud. She and her husband Proctor had been pillars of their small Michigan community, owners of a restaurant and store. They had been loved for their community work, raising money to help flood victims and others but it turns out they were skimming money for themselves as well as committing food stamp fraud. What we learn early on is that they were turned in to the authorities by one of their teenaged daughters, Kim. Kim and twin sister Baby Vi have been living with the youngest Cochran sibling, Lillian, due to their parents’ arrest and incarceration. The situation in Lillian’s home is fraught. Baby Vi and Kim are targets for bullying at school due to their parents’ crimes. Baby Vi reacts by keeping her head down and doing her best in school while Kim is angry and frequently in trouble. Lillian, who is also caring for her deceased ex-husband’s aging grandmother, has moved into her parents’ old home and done substantial renovation (she is an interior designer) but Lillian cannot exorcise her old ghosts. She is borderline OCD, constantly checking on everyone to make sure they are “safe.”
As the novel unfolds, the reader sees how each of the Cochran sisters’ personal problems are rooted in their childhood. Mrs. Cochran died when Althea was 12 and the other children, including little brother Joe, were very young. Mr. Cochran was a traveling preacher whose rages and absences formed who his children became. Althea bore much of her father’s rage as the eldest and found the first opportunity she could to get away from home. She married Proctor at 18 and found herself saddled with her younger siblings while their father was away. Viola moved away to college, and even though she had been a good student and rarely faced her father’s anger, she developed bulimia, a condition she still battles as an adult. Viola is a counselor to young women but her eating disorder and unresolved childhood issues threaten her own health as well as her relationship with her wife Eva. The three Cochran sisters, each dealing with weighty matters in their personal lives, feel unequipped to handle Baby Vi and Kim; moreover, Kim and Althea are at odds with each other (and each very angry), with Althea refusing to let either of her children visit her while she is imprisoned.
Author Anissa Gray, who herself has dealt with an eating disorder, and who is a lesbian and a black woman, writes about her character’s struggles with clarity and empathy. I was drawn into each of the sister’s stories and deeply moved by the sorrow and trauma they experience. The reader sees that that trauma is a generational phenomenon, one that the sisters inherited from their parents and that they risk passing along to the next generation unless they find a way to address it. Female characters are front and center in this story: the sisters, the daughters and even the other female inmates in Althea’s correctional institution, most of whom also suffer from the same sort of generational trauma from which there seems to be no escape. I found Gray’s treatment of her male characters to be worthy of note as well. Proctor is the steadfast husband and father, devoted to his family and trying, even from within prison, to be a source of strength for his wife and daughters. Proctor is also the one who will speak the blunt truth to Althea in the end. Joe, the victim of abuse himself, cannot admit to his own shortcomings and would prefer to let the past stay in the past. Mr. Cochran is already dead when this novel opens but he casts a powerful shadow over his children, haunting them still.
Ultimately, Gray’s characters will have to discover where their strength is and whether they can confront their pasts in order to move on to a better and different future. This is one of those stories that is hard to put down. I recommend it wholeheartedly but take the trigger warnings seriously.