HOW TO BE EATEN (2022, Little, Brown) reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma. Little Red Riding Hood, all grown up, is frequently in crisis and self-destructive, ostensibly reenacting the terrible traumatic thrill of being digested by a wolf. Gretel is wary of kindness, rarely eats, and reluctantly dates. Bluebeard’s Girlfriend, as she’s called in the tabloids, grapples with the fact that she fell in love with a serial-killing tech bro billionaire. Ashlee, the most recent winner of a certain reality TV show dating show, is grappling with life after getting a "villain edit."
Ultimately, HOW TO BE EATEN is a novel not just about trauma, but about how stories are consumed and who gets consumed by them. It’s about women finding their voices. It’s a ripe theme for fairy tales, which have long been viewed as tales told by women for children, and have been written off as a non-serious, domestic art. But here are the women, with all of the power and humor and insight they posses, grappling with their pasts and deciding for themselves how to move on into the future.