An Interview with Chelsea G. Summers on "A Certain Hunger"

Chelsea G. Summers, the mastermind behind the character of Dorothy Daniels and A Certain Hunger, sat down to chat with me about the novel, cannibalism, and more. Originally published in October of 2024

Tell me a little bit about yourself and what made you want to be a writer in the first place.

Gosh, what makes anyone want to be a writer? Insanity? I don’t know (laughter), seriously, it’s like you have voices in your head and you want to get them out on paper. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid and read a lot. My mom was an English teacher, so I got introduced to reading, plays, and books, very early. I didn’t really believe I was capable of doing it until I hit middle age.

You wrote a lot of nonfiction before you started writing fiction, correct?

I mean, I started writing fiction in high school and throughout my many stents in college. But yeah, I was being paid as a wine marketing writer when I went to Italy, which was how I did the research that ended up being in A Certain Hunger. I’d also written for magazines and websites, a lot of nonfiction. Which is cool, I enjoy doing it, but it just doesn’t pay enough.

You were directly in the field, was that how the idea for A Certain Hunger came to be?

No actually, it came when a friend of mine told me I could write my Eat Pray Love, the zombie chicklet that nobody ever asked for. Once I came back with a broken heart, I revisited that concept. That was the genesis of Dorothy and the whole cannibal food critic.

I enjoyed this book because I learned so much from it about the food, and of course about the mind of a cannibal. A lot of what you said really stuck with me, even if it was from the perspective of a psychopath who eats men.

Even a broken clock, or cannibalistic serial killer can be right twice a day. 

What drew you to writing about cannibalism in the first place?

Well, American Psycho really bothered me because it was so misogynistic even though it’s a satire, and it’s so revered in our culture, so there was that. And then Hannibal the television series was on around the same time I was writing it, and I really loved what Hannibal was doing. Plus, I’d read all the Thomas Harris books multiple times. I wanted to write a character like that that was fallible but also female. I had also been consuming a lot of true crime stuff which led me down the psychopathic rabbit hole. All of these things, plus Eat Pray Love, my rage at being middle aged and being perimenopausal, the feeling of ageism in the writing industry. All these things were broiling at the same time. 

I do feel like most of the things I’ve read or watched about cannibalism have been specifically about men, and since we were so deeply in Dorothy’s mind, it had a huge impact. I do feel like this book spearheaded the revival of cannibalism in modern day media in a lot of ways, of course we had things such as Bones and All and Lapvona as well. 

It’s been a lot of things happening at once. Of course, there was Hannibal, and we got Yellowjackets, Bones And All, Tender is the Flesh, Ethel Cain. Similar to vampirism, cannibalism is a very plastic metaphor that allows itself to be open to multiple readings. Historically, there’s survival cannibalism which is the only literal form of cannibalism, and everything after that is metaphor. Cultures that use cannibalism as a way of honoring or remembering, it’s metaphorical, even though it’s actual cannibalism. I think currently what is so accessible about the cannibalism metaphor is late stage capitalism, climate destruction, and women’s performance in the media, the ways that our stories are kind of mined over to become content for other people’s rubbernecking. There’s different ways that cannibalism hits the culture that explains things and makes sense to ourselves.

It’s been used in so many different ways now that it can be a metaphor for just about anything, which I kind of like. Like in Bones and All, it felt like a romantic gesture.

Romance and class. The thing I really like about that movie, especially about the way it was filmed, is that you really get a sense of people who are just eeking by through this world. By the skin of their teeth and the skin in their teeth, which I found really interesting on an intellectual level. There’s so many times in a relationship where it feels all-consuming, or you want to be consumed. Even in Fresh, which kind of picks apart the metaphor of women’s bodies as things to be consumed as pieces, so that women aren’t whole proactive beings, they’re just body parts for desire. That was a really interesting take on it. 

Dorothy’s character is so raw which I really appreciate, she said a lot of things that I really agreed with, which would then take me back full circle to remembering she’s a psychopath. But I felt so in line with some of the things she was thinking and saying. I really loved that about how you wrote her.

In writing Dorothy, I can be a really self-doubting writer, I just allowed myself to be powered by her sense of unshakeable self confidence. It was really helpful.