Summary

It's the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, dozing off to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair. In stark contrast stands her brother Tommy, the pride and joy of their immigrant parents: a popular honor student destined to be the first in the family to attend college. The thought of Tommy leaving for college fills Ronny with dread, as she contemplates the quiet house she will be left alone in with her parents, Me and Ba.

Their parents rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the lens of food. The family's meals are a tapestry of cultural memory: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem nuong, and steaming bowls of pho tai with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.

But when tragedy strikes, Ronny's world is upended. Her sense of self and her understanding of her family are shattered. A few nights later, at her first high school party, a boy crosses the line, and Ronny is overtaken by a force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for raw meat, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.

What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage. Ronny's Vietnamese lineage and her mother's emotional memory play a crucial role in this tender ode to generational trauma and mother-daughter bonding.

Beyond the Book:
Generational Trauma in Vietnamese American Fiction

In 1975, the US military withdrew from Vietnam after having signed the Paris Peace Accords two years prior. This marked the end of the Vietnam War, and it left millions of Vietnamese citizens vulnerable—those who had had close ties to the US military were now under threat of being persecuted by the new communist regime. An estimated 125,000 were evacuated that year to resettle in the States, and waves of immigration followed over the next several decades. As of 2022 there was a Vietnamese immigrant population of 1.3 million in the US.

The Vietnam War left lasting scars on those who were displaced. Though in many cases their immigration was aided by the US government, they were often met with racism and xenophobia by Americans who did not approve of their government's resettlement programs. Many families and individuals battled social isolation, depression, grief at the loss of family members and cultural identity, and other forms of PTSD and psychological trauma.

Children of immigrants with this kind of history may feel and respond to family trauma in different ways throughout their upbringing and adulthood, and many have chosen to explore it through the lens of fiction.

Ocean Vuong's debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is written as a letter from a young man, Little Dog, to his mother, a Vietnamese immigrant, who will never read it as she is illiterate. The narrative that results is therefore vulnerable and unsparing, as Little Dog confesses to his struggles with assimilating to American society while still honoring his Vietnamese heritage, as the spectre of the war hangs over their family.

In K.T. Nguyen's debut thriller You Know What You Did, a first generation Vietnamese American immigrant slowly loses her grip on reality in the wake of the death of her mother, a Vietnam War refugee. As Annie gets caught up in a murder investigation, the shadows of her mother's past continue to haunt her, in a novel that manages to be both thrilling and a poignant exploration of how refugee trauma is passed down through generations.

Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen follows a woman, Huong, and her two sons who settle in New Orleans after the war, though the patriarch of the family, Cong, was forced to stay behind in Vietnam. She initially sends letters and holds out hope that she will be reunited with Cong one day, but eventually comes to terms with the fact that she will never see her husband again. Her two children grow older feeling their father's absence acutely as all three attempt to assimilate into American society in their own ways.

Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao tells two interlocking stories, one narrated by a mother, the other by her daughter. Both are Vietnamese refugees, but the daughter was so young when they escaped that she has no problem adjusting to American society, while her mother struggles. Published in 1998, Monkey Bridge was one of the first novels to grapple with intergenerational trauma in Vietnamese American families.

Catherine Dang's What Hunger navigates many of these same themes in a largely allegorical way, as teenage girl Ronny's rage and angst is channeled into a thirst for human flesh—a primal desire that she discovers ultimately connects back to her family's intergenerational trauma.

Summary

Lena wants her life back. Her wealthy, controlling, humorless husband has just died, and now she contends with her controlling, humorless son, Drew. Lena lands in Naxos with her best friend in tow for the unveiling of her son's, pet project--the luxurious Agape Villas.

Years of marriage amongst the wealthy elite has whittled Lena's spirit into rope and sinew, smothered by tasteful cocktail dresses and unending small talk. On Naxos she yearns to rediscover her true nature, remember the exuberant dancer and party girl she once was, but Drew tightens his grip, keeping her cloistered inside the hotel, demanding that she fall in line.

Lena is intrigued by a group of women living in tents on the beach in front of the Agape. She can feel their drums at night, hear their seductive leader calling her to dance. Soon she'll find that an ancient God stirs on the beach, awakening dark desires of women across the island. The only questions left will be whether Lena will join them, and what it will cost her.

Ecstasy is a riveting, darkly poetic, one-sitting read about empowerment, desire, and what happens when women reject the roles set out for them.

Beyond the Book:
Redefining the Role of the Mythological Bacchae

In ancient Greco-Roman mythology, the Bacchae—also known as Maenads—were female followers of Dionysus (also known as Bacchus), god of wine and revelry. While some devoted themselves to him voluntarily, others were said to be possessed, driven mad and forced into servitude by his intoxicating power.

Dionysus journeyed throughout the land, claiming cities and enacting his rule on the population. If a city rejected his rites in service to another god, he would punish the residents by setting the women among them into a frenzy, ultimately converting them into Bacchae and bolstering his cohort.

While under the influence of Dionysus, the Bacchae were imbued with superhuman strength, capable of tearing apart animals and men alike with their bare hands. When not carrying out these violent acts, they were typically engaged in wild celebration, abandoning their roles as wives and mothers and taking to the hills, where they would sing and dance in praise of their god. All of this led to a culture of fear and mistrust surrounding them, and the perception that the women were mad. Indeed, the Greek name Maenads translates to "raving ones."

First performed in 405 BCE, the play by Euripides, The Bacchae, features perhaps the best-known depiction of the titular women. In the story, they are compelled to abandon their homes and head for the mountains, where they sing, dance, drink, and have sex in a display of ritualistic hedonism. As Dionysus' power grows, so too does his lust for chaos and vengeance against those he feels have dishonored him. As a result of his frustrations, the women are driven to greater acts of madness, kidnapping children from a nearby village, slaughtering a herd of cattle, and ultimately committing murder.

In her novel Ecstasy, Ivy Pochoda reimagines Euripides' work in a distinctly modern setting. Here, the Bacchae take the form of a group of women camping on a beach on the island of Naxos. Their late-night dance parties—fueled by drugs and alcohol—escalate into increasingly violent acts, just like their ancient counterparts. But Pochoda gives their story a dark feminist twist. Led by a woman this time around, the group eventually channels their rage against the men who seek to oppose or command them. It's a clever reframing of their role within the narrative, flipping the script from enslaved women in service to a man against their will, to a group of women raging against societal norms and taking back control.

"Dance of the Maenad" circa 1765 by Andries Cornelis Lens, located at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

"En bacchantinde på en søtiger" by Christen Køble circa 1839, located at the Glyptotek, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons CC by PDM 1.0

Summary

Paris, a winter's night in 1983. The girl is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. Set in Oslo, New York, and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a bravura quest through layers of oblivion that probes the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris. Girl, 1983 is a raw, stark, and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.

Beyond the Book:
Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman

In Girl, 1983, Linn Ullmann uses the tools of fiction to dissect a teenaged narrator's traumatic encounter with an older man. That narrator's biography has numerous parallels to Ullmann's own, including a turbulent adolescence divided among New York, Norway, and Sweden—the result of being the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and director Ingmar Bergman, two of the most important European cultural figures of the 20^th century.

The elder Ullmann and Bergman met in 1965, when she was in her mid-20s and he was in his mid-40s. Both were married at the time; Bergman had in fact been married four times already and had seven children. The director was by this point one of Europe's foremost filmmakers, having achieved international success in the late 1950s with avant-garde works such as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Ullmann had established herself as a stage actress but was still a relative unknown when Bergman cast her in Persona (opposite his former lover, Bibi Andersson). The film was quickly hailed a masterpiece, and it launched an intense personal and professional relationship that was to last decades.

Not long after the two met, Ullmann left her husband and moved to Fårö, the remote island in the Baltic where Bergman had decided to build his home after using it as the location for Through a Glass Darkly in 1961. The couple quickly had a daughter (Linn, the author of Girl, 1983), and at first life on the island was idyllic: Ullmann has described her first year there as like "living in soft walls of sunlight, desire and happiness." The honeymoon wasn't to last, however, and the island of a few hundred people came to resemble something of a prison for Ullmann. Bergman was notoriously possessive, with a jealousy that Ullmann has described as "violent and without boundaries." He would only allow her to meet others on a Wednesday, and she remembers how, on her return, she would find him standing watch and waiting for her.

The intensity of the relationship didn't bode well for its longevity, and it ended messily in the early 1970s as a result of one of the director's infidelities. However, out of their romantic breakup, the pair salvaged what came to be an extremely fruitful creative partnership. Acclaimed films Face to Face and Autumn Sonata earned both of them Academy Award nominations in the 1970s, and they continued collaborating until Bergman retired from directing in 1982. (Bergman wrote his final film, Fanny and Alexander, with Ullmann in mind, and the actress has spoken of her regret at turning down the lead role. It would go on to win four Oscars.)

Bergman died in 2007, on his island home of Fårö. He left behind a celebrated artistic legacy, but a more complicated personal one. As their daughter Linn writes in Unquiet, the first book in her current trilogy, "I was his child and her child, but never their child, it was never us three." Her mother has spoken of how upset she first was at her daughter's "very selective … memories of her childhood"—but the impact of Linn's unstable early years is undeniable when reading her work. Yet in spite of their turbulent relationship, Ullmann and Bergman created enduring landmarks in the history of film; and as time passes, Ullmann's contribution to that legacy is being better appreciated. As John Lithgow said when she was finally awarded an Oscar in 2022, "Ingmar is a genius who made all these movies, but the question is, 'What would he have been without Liv?'"

Liv Ullmann with daughter Linn, 1966
Photo by Rigmor Dahl Delphin (1908-1993), courtesy of Oslo Museum