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 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Jolly Time”
Dorothy found the men in Boston to be slackers: She didn’t have to do much research because they barely tried to hide their bad behavior. She also slept with Boston women.
In April 1988, Dorothy’s mother called and asked her to come home with her siblings. Dorothy had investigated her father and knew about his various infidelities. She describes her parents’ relationship as codependent, unhealthy, and horrible.
Dorothy sent her father’s past mistress a note written in her mother’s handwriting, scaring her off. Her father has a new mistress, but Dorothy doesn’t bother contacting her.
Dorothy’s mother developed stage four lung cancer. As her health deteriorated, animals ate her garden. Dorothy’s siblings moved home to help, but Dorothy only returned once her mother was in hospice. She found the cancer undignified. Her mother died at 52. She told Dorothy she was never her favorite, and Dorothy felt the same about her mother.
In prison, Dorothy recalls her mother showing her makeup, describing it as a woman’s armor. She told Dorothy to be excellent at whatever she does.
Dorothy moved to New York after receiving a $60,000 inheritance. In the summer of 1989, she began working at Gotham Ace, writing another lifestyle column. She describes a night when she and Emma went home with several well-connected men, but they did not have sex with them. Emma finally moved to New York nine years later.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Lampredotto”
A year into her prison sentence, Dorothy isn’t sure whether she regrets anything about her crimes. When she thinks of the men, she knows she would kill them all again. She discusses Marco, her most important victim. They met in 1983 in Siena, Italy, while Dorothy studied abroad. She enjoyed the aggressive physical approach of most Italian men, as she likes being objectified, but she had no interest in anything they said.
During her walks in Siena, a man began following her. One day, he followed her to her door, forcing his way in. He raped Dorothy and disappeared. She describes the experience as fascinating.
Dorothy couldn’t find any damning information on Marco. However, he refused to go to Rome, which confused her. Eventually, while searching his room, she found a business card to a butcher shop bearing the name Davide Marco Iachino and a passport under a floorboard beneath his bed. Marco was really Davide, a married butcher from Rome. He was likely in Siena avoiding his responsibilities, including taking over the family business. Dorothy was intrigued, particularly because of the complex rules of Jewish butchery.
Dorothy returned to Pennistone for her senior year without confronting Marco, but she visited Rome after graduation. She looked forward to frightening Marco with her information. When she visited him, he was wearing a wedding ring. At a hotel, she sucked the ring off his finger and spat it onto his chest. For the next 30 years, they continued to meet, but never in Rome. Marco said his marriage was largely for business.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Truffles”
On December 12, 2000, Dorothy went to Italy for work. She was also writing her first book, Ravenous. She met a man named Giovanni on a train, where they had sex.
Dorothy’s assignment required her to look for truffles. After describing truffle hunting, she recalls arguing with Giovanni while driving. During the quarrel, they drove over something. When Giovanni got out to investigate, Dorothy hit him with the car; she says that her foot slipped, preventing her from braking in time. During the collision, Giovanni was impaled on a bar from the guard rail behind him. The impact eviscerated him, and Dorothy found his visible liver irresistible. She removed his liver and took it to the farmhouse where she and Giovanni had been staying. The farmer’s wife cleaned and refrigerated it. Later, Dorothy cooked and ate the liver in Giovanni’s apartment.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Rump Roast”
Dorothy writes that most humans carry 66 pounds of edible meat. She describes the surprising amount of information available about how to cook people and claims cannibalism is legal in much of the US.
The cops briefly questioned her after Giovanni’s death. She admitted that they fought and said that she drove away after he threw the keys at her. Dorothy writes that she’s confessing in this memoir because she is already in trouble and wants to involve her reader while remaining the center of attention.
She writes that killing Andrew was even easier. She put Xanax in Andrew’s drink and let carbon monoxide kill him before slicing off two pieces of his buttocks. She hadn’t believed she would do it until the moment she found herself committing the murder.
She writes, “[H]uman meat makes me think of magic. […] like eating a unicorn, or Pegasus, or a griffin” (94). It makes her feel powerful.
Dorothy recounts her history with Andrew. In 1997, she caught him with her assistant and, as punishment, alerted the IRS to his tax shelter. She eventually learned that he married that assistant, and they had twins in 2001. She couldn’t imagine Andrew as a father.
He was happy when they met again, 10 years later—something she arranged to look like an accident. They had sex that night. She marveled at women like the assistant—someone who could choose a long-term relationship.
Dorothy discusses historical cannibalism, both as a result of starvation and as an act of symbolism wherein one takes on a trait of the consumed person. She also points to the prevalence of violent and cannibalistic metaphors, such as sports chants or Christians taking the Sacrament as a form of weekly cannibalism.
After taking the meat from Andrew, she let his dogs in. When she left, one was licking blood from his hip.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
In this section, Dorothy’s attitude toward her mother and father helps to reveal some of the foundation of her perspective on Power Dynamics in Relationships. Dorothy has been partially shaped by her mother, who was a great cook and expressed an understanding of societal perceptions of femininity, but Dorothy never speaks of loving her. Dorothy explains that her parents had a codependent relationship that she found detestable, writing, “Some people grow together like horrible species of lichen. My parents, I learned, were precisely this kind of symbiotic organism” (53). This perspective, when combined with the fact that her father was routinely unfaithful to her mother, makes Dorothy’s cynicism more clearly rooted in her childhood. She witnessed a lopsided relationship where the woman, her mother, inhabited a stereotypically domestic role and the man, her father, worked and always had a mistress. To Dorothy, this means that her father held all the power, as she views sex and power as nearly synonymous, demonstrating the theme of The Intersections of Food, Sex, and Death. Further, her mother’s desire to give food contrasts with Dorothy’s Desire and Consumption of food, suggesting that power is sometimes held by the person receiving fine food rather than the person who makes the fine food. This further aligns with her own career as a food critic, as she was always receiving rather than giving. Dorothy has made clear her desire for sensual pleasures and power above all else, and her career combined the two.
Additionally, Dorothy spends little time on the murders of Giovanni and Andrew. In fact, she speaks of the meals they provided her with more relish than the killings, making it challenging to pin down her motivations and instead consider that killing is simply an instinct in Dorothy. Indeed, when she discusses Giovanni’s death, there is a slight moment of uncertainty where she says that her foot might have slipped on the car pedal. It’s not clear whether she believes this, but there is no doubt that the following two murders were premeditated or that she found Giovanni’s visible liver irresistible.
Dorothy spends much of this section discussing the nature of morality while exerting increasing pressure on the reader to examine their participation in reading her story, writing, “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” (91). In using second-person narration and breaking the fourth wall, Dorothy further invites her reader into her crimes and suggests that the reader is there to enjoy her suffering. She accuses the reader of essentially partaking in her crimes without facing repercussions, suggesting that cannibalism, whether literal or symbolic, is everywhere: The reader’s Desire and Consumption of Dorothy’s account is, in itself, a form of cannibalism. Dorothy suggests that to relate to her is to admit to some commonality or a shared desire to go against societal standards, whether it is Dorothy’s aversion to traditional relationships and families or her desire for violence. However, Dorothy’s thoughts and feelings tend to become actions, and most thoughts of violence and murder, for the general populace, do not manifest in actual acts of violence and murder. As such, she is incarcerated, and her readers are not, but in addressing her reader directly, she seeks to incriminate them morally.
This section also takes Dorothy to memories of Italy, where she enjoyed the straightforward way that men “objectified” her “as if they wanted to devour [her]” (64). This language further evokes the theme of Desire and Consumption, as Dorothy enjoys the prospect of being consumed and desired as much as she delights in consuming and desiring herself. Italy also introduces Marco, who is significant because he is the one man who Dorothy initially uncovered no bad information on. However, she learned that he was both married and concealing his identity. Her sucking the wedding band off of his finger and spitting it out at him presents a metaphor for her perception of marriage: It is an easily hidden, ultimately hollow symbol of commitment.
Finally, in Italy, Dorothy was raped, and while she describes the act as little more than “interesting,” her silence is, in a way, telling. From Dorothy’s account of the event and her feelings about it, it legitimately doesn’t appear to have traumatized her any more than the violence she’s inflicted upon others has. She describes her violation with the same distanced, affectless manner as when she describes impaling Giovanni with the car, removing Giovanni’s liver, or cooking and eating it. This emotional distance from violence, whether inflicted or received, demonstrates Dorothy’s own predatory instincts. In allowing the man to go unpunished, it is as if she has locked the experience away along with her other studies on human behavior, which makes her appear at the top of the metaphorical food chain. She did not perceive the man as a threat and therefore had no desire to take revenge, despite the fact that she is a skilled blackmailer, having threatened past lovers with punishment. This demonstrates Dorothy’s emotional removal from her own human experiences, as if she is moving through the world as nothing more than a curious outsider, absorbing or acting out only when she sees fit.
