"The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls" by Anissa Gray

 

Anissa Gray presents us with the dire predicament and splintered nature of the Cochran family in The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls. The girls of the title,  the sisters and daughters of newly incarcerated Althea, each suffer from distinct and realistic challenges, from eating disorders to obsessive/compulsive behavior to substance abuse. Their progress and setbacks depend on cohesion and support from within their group, but it must come from members who doubt their own ability to provide it. Recounting how these desperate young people cope with personal travails makes for rewarding, vivid reading.

Long-simmering difficulties reach crisis when the state of Michigan finds Althea, the matriarchal figure of two sisters and two daughters, guilty of fraud, and sentences her to five years in prison. The narrative consists of the flurry of guilt, anger, fear, and psychic trauma suffered by the women in the wake of this verdict. We meet several of Althea’s fellow inmates and hear their bitter, sometimes inspired, reaction to their terrible lives. But the book mainly contains the insights and troubled memories of the three adult sisters as they try (without much confidence) to pick up and move on from Althea’s misdeeds. It’s told in a rotating first-person point of view of Althea and her two sisters.

Ravenously Hungry Girls contains heart-rending closeups of each sister’s struggle with her debilitating experiences and the irresistible force of their fears and compulsions. Gray doesn’t sugarcoat any of these issues, nor does she play them for sympathy. No, she paints her characters honestly, warts and all, and shares their failings and their dogged good intentions. 

Through it all, the author reminds her readers of the institutional and cultural handicaps under which these women live. Their race presents its own disadvantages, and the men in their lives are quite far from perfect. Yet the writing hews to the unvarnished, unidealized truth, and she lets her readers judge the rightness of the characters and the narrative for themselves. For me, this novel hits the nail on the head, and shows its author to be a teller of a memorable story, with power, color, and unblinking honesty.