The Anorexic Maison

By Carrie Chang

“The Anorexic Maison,” is a coup d’etat of verbal acrobatics, about the Great Habitué of Non-eating, a 21st libertarian circus of snide effects in which the glam gals confess why they take refuge in the Maison after years of being on the diet circuit.
(Excerpt from the book) “There are many hypocritical women in this house but lovely women too,” says Jenny, the matron of house who wants to eat its doors and shutters. There’s a mea culpa attitude in her strange effusive voice, some willingness to concede it is the hour of compassion for all women, a place where they can eat their bingo under the roofs, and kick up their yin-yang heels.
“I said Anorexic Mee-sawn, pardon my French, it’s fucked, like mice in the house,” said Jenny, who wolfs down her Guadeloupe homey Mexican bars by the dozen and shudders in her ocean blue jeans. She admitted the whole thing was about getting even, svelte and more svelte, by the way, until you continued to persist in this fashion, not eating for whatever reason that is wholly personal.
“Asian girls don’t eat,” by the way, she adds, “You never know when it’s sneaking up on you.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369410585

Carrie Chang

Carrie Chang was born in 1970, in Syracuse, New York. She attended Stanford University, UC-Berkeley and New York University, obtaining her B.A., and M.J. and M.F.A. in English and journalism and creative writing, respectively. She worked as an Asian American journalist in the arts/political field for almost a decade, creating her own magazine, “Monolid,” and lives as a writer/poet in the Bay Area. Her favorite pastimes include swimming and painting.

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The Anorexic

Maison

Carrie Chang

Copyright © 2023 by Carrie Chang.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 11/06/2023

Xlibris

844-714-8691

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"They did not know where the sound came from.

Only that it was hungry."

—-Anne Sexton

In the Anorexic Maison, there is the sound of feet scurrying to the left and the right, and the little cabbage-faced women putting out the lantern with a virile gusto, denying they’d ever done anything other than take less and less. In a world in which a fork is a weapon, and a scale is a counter-weapon, it gnaws one to be so damn negative, but I’ve checked in many dreadful times, only to find soulful grief as my companion, and a belly full of whey; this is a dangerous book of confession and experiential non-confession (I am hiding something from you that could be my only hysteria, or my true weight, which is blurred forever, out of true memory).

There are many hypocritical women in this house but lovely women too, says Jenny, the matron of house who wants to eat its doors and shutters. There’s a mea culpa attitude in her strange effusive voice, some willingness to concede it is the hour of compassion for all women, a place where they can eat their bingo under the roofs, and kick up their yin-yang heels.

"I said Anorexic Mee-sawn, pardon my French, it’s fucked, like mice in the house," said Jenny, who wolfs down her Guadeloupe homey Mexican bars by the dozen and shudders in her ocean blue jeans. She admitted the whole thing was about getting even, svelte and more svelte, by the way, until you continued to persist in this fashion, not eating for whatever reason that is wholly personal.

Asian girls don’t eat, by the way, she adds, You never know when it’s sneaking up on you.

There’s a Cinderella belt around the house, and a butler who serves the sushi that’s calorie-free, and a large gate to the entry-way that’s the dolorous color of cream cheese. I knew I had my sights on living here, lips trembling, thinking I’m lost in outer-space, with cold limbs feeling plummy disorder, living out an everyman experience, in a dark, distorted way. You call this romantic? I call it bullshit thinking, talking thighs and talking hips of subversive feminism. Where no one is judging you or looking over your shoulder offering you the lousy diatribe about est or how to eat a sandwich with sardines in it. While your head goes off-color, the television flickers with pictures of hot dogs and hamburgers in stealthy neon green.

This is your nth diet, give it up and be fat, says the loudspeaker blaring overhead. There is a cumbersome static voice, that admits brittle joy at last.

Never, say the women, who hobble down to the pantry at midnight to get food before it’s too late.

My head still hurts, said Teresa, who adds, I don’t care what you say. Pho is phony love, and I can’t get anything else that satisfies me, that’s why I know….

It’s the way you look, in fighter colors, revolting against the Establishment of Eating, etc. looking so terribly jetsam on a conservative Monday, and getting into trouble on a whopping Friday. That flippant discord of yours, leaning towards gluten-free pasta and seeming innocuous, sis, with your sideways stare, of course. Kings denounce really you as the subtlest, most disturbed uncanny people in the entire erstwhile nation. There are so many of you hidden out there in your beautiful, subway limbs that the gawking has become an all too tragic obsession, the possessive outlook on gaunt bodies that have been processed already through the Universal Diet Mill.

We are operating on less, the entire world shrinking in total ldisharmony, says Jenny who adds that Anorexia has become an elastic word, indeed, a-nor-ex-ee-ya, no pudding on the plate, for people who eat and do not eat. "Right now, I’m living in the Maison pushing food away on an imaginary plate and counting the trafficking passing hours when I can confront myself again in the magic mirror most indecently."

These are the infrequent signs of a show-and-tell nation, where one’s actual physical numbers matter so much that one wavers into a permanent state of narcissistic contempt, and even mere invisibility. There’s a confused woman in the wet mirror that fears her cohorts mainly, and measures herself with a controlling eye of probity, unable to see past the long aching corridor where the mutable darkness masks the past like a ribbon of pretty lies, and outrageous hi-jinks.

I certainly don’t like the feeling of being full, said Teresa, who wrote to her friends across that nation, asking them to come see her often. You have to visit me in the Anorexic Maison, it’s where the beef is green, she said, filing her nails.

"Tofu is also I think an euphemism for anorexia, it is just blah blah blah blah