I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat
Christopher Gonzalez
When you purchase a book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission and so do independent book stores.
|
I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat by Christopher Gonzalez opens with a narrator hungry to fill the void of his early twenties loneliness with a picture—A representation of lost love. Each of Gonzalez’s fifteen stories follows a bisexual Puerto Rican man fueled by deep pain and longing. In “A Mountain of Invertebrates” he writes: “So much effort and mess? All of that for so little?” This is a thread that runs throughout the collection—an exhausting fear that each protagonist and inevitably all of us must work so hard to find joy in life only to end up with the barest crumbs.
Each of these characters share a trauma from youth, of not knowing love from their families or even themselves, and all of them are scared that no one will ever love them fully. We join them on their journeys for companionship: Searching through apps or bars or even childhood memories for someone who might give them the love they crave. Gonzalez’s response is to take these little moments of grief and loneliness on the journey towards companionship and explore the absurdity of it all. One story has the narrator attend a party thrown by a wealthy straight couple to celebrate their new washing machine, another has a narrator rent out an apartment he’s supposed to be watching for friends on vacation; in another, an eyebrow artist sews other people’s eyebrow hair onto the narrator to give him Chris Pine’s eyebrow shape. Each of these scenarios is ridiculous—fully playing up situations until we can’t help to laugh in discomfort. Yet, despite each of these situations feeling like the worst exaggerations of millennial dating, a feeling permeates all of them which the story, “The Secret to Your Best Self,” sums up as: “And the craving dissipates. And he stops missing what he cannot have.” Each character wants to find something—be it food or casual sex—to serve as a stand-in for what the shared desire for connection. The collection is asking us: What wouldn’t you do to feel less lonely? |
Yet, underneath that question and the absurdity of the stories, there’s a deeper pain. In the story “Little Moves,” the narrator Felix grieves his homophobic sister, and, as he tries to decide what to do with her ashes, he struggles about how exactly to grieve a sister who never loved all of him. The story ends with Felix thinking about the dancing lessons his sister gave him in preparation for his future girlfriend, then, he dances with her urn, so enraptured in the lost possibility of love from his sister that he doesn’t notice her ashes spilling everywhere. The fullness of the collection speaks to loneliness, for each narrator and us, but also of a fear that the people we love cannot love all of us.
Other stories write past that fear and towards a deeper connection. “I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat,” the titular story, introduces a narrator who makes “room in [his] stomach” to meet up with a friend, Valeria, for dinner. She reveals her struggles with work; after the meal she seems to still have more to say so they order dessert despite his fullness so uncomfortable he can’t listen to her. It’s such a simple moment, but it savors the companionship that the other stories long for. This story, at the heart of a collection that pushes the bounds of reality, shows us an incredibly tender moment born of the mundane, and Gonzalez proves himself a writer who can grasp a shared pain of loneliness to reveal characters willing to endure heartbreaking and often absurd situations in order to find understanding and love. Instead of mocking them, we laugh along at the heartbreaking absurdity which is, yes, our own.
With these stories, Gonzalez shows us that we're not alone in our loneliness or the fear that we cannot be ourselves and loved, and through these narrators he encourages us to push past that fear.
Christopher Gonzalez is a queer Puerto Rican writer living in New York. He is the author of the short story collection I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat. His writing has also appeared in Catapult, Cosmonauts Avenue, the Forge, Little Fiction, Lunch Ticket, the Millions, and the Nation, among others.
I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat is a publication by Santa Fe Writer's Project.
Other stories write past that fear and towards a deeper connection. “I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat,” the titular story, introduces a narrator who makes “room in [his] stomach” to meet up with a friend, Valeria, for dinner. She reveals her struggles with work; after the meal she seems to still have more to say so they order dessert despite his fullness so uncomfortable he can’t listen to her. It’s such a simple moment, but it savors the companionship that the other stories long for. This story, at the heart of a collection that pushes the bounds of reality, shows us an incredibly tender moment born of the mundane, and Gonzalez proves himself a writer who can grasp a shared pain of loneliness to reveal characters willing to endure heartbreaking and often absurd situations in order to find understanding and love. Instead of mocking them, we laugh along at the heartbreaking absurdity which is, yes, our own.
With these stories, Gonzalez shows us that we're not alone in our loneliness or the fear that we cannot be ourselves and loved, and through these narrators he encourages us to push past that fear.
Christopher Gonzalez is a queer Puerto Rican writer living in New York. He is the author of the short story collection I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat. His writing has also appeared in Catapult, Cosmonauts Avenue, the Forge, Little Fiction, Lunch Ticket, the Millions, and the Nation, among others.
I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat is a publication by Santa Fe Writer's Project.
Comment Box is loading comments...
|
|