Eat My Heart Out - Zoe Pilger

‘Looking into your sarcastic eyes is like looking into the post-feminist whirly-pool itself’.

Beginning in a literal meat-market, before careering its way through Soho restaurants, Cambridge colleges and East London pop-up galleries, Zoe Pilger’s debut novel is a savage and exhilarating read, managing to parody the conventions of romantic comedy whilst also providing an abrasive commentary on the politics of post-feminism, through the eyes of the protagonist, Anne-Marie.

Ann-Marie is directionless since dropping out of university. Her romantic life has been shattered by the revelation that ‘my ex-boyfriend Sebastian was fucking this girl from the home counties called Allegra behind my back’. She shares a flat with her gay best friend, a wannabe director, who films her re-enacting famous literary suicides. Away from the structured life of academia, she feels lost, only able to read ‘terrible comic-style-philosophy manuals, and only one or two sentences at a time’. For want of anything better to do, she works as the ‘reception bitch’ at an awful overpriced restaurant, whose awful patrons say awful things like ‘She’s a paradigm of selfish fucking neo-liberal individualism, Stephanie.’ (shades of William Donaldson’s parody of received opinion, I’m Leaving You, Simon, You Disgust Me?).

So far, the set-up is structurally similar to the standard chick-lit theme of the unlucky-in-love young woman, looking for the right person to come along and help her to get her life on track (albeit an unsanitised, druggy version, more ketamine than chardonnay). Then, the novel goes down the rabbit hole. During what turns out to be her final shift at the restaurant, she meets Stephanie Haight, an icon of second wave feminism who decides to make Ann-Marie her next project. Acting like a radical fairy godmother, Stephanie forces the younger woman to take part in voodoo rebirthing ceremonies, strip-club auditions and Woman’s Hour interviews, whilst attempting to introduce a critical framework to underpin Ann-Marie’s existence. What becomes clear is that there is an unbridgeable generation gap separating the two. Stephanie is happy to hold forth as an observer of ‘this Sadeian generation, raised on internet pornography’, but she never really understands her subject, dismissing anything she disagrees with as ‘childish provocation’.

In one telling scene, Stephanie demands that Ann-Marie take part in a form of primal scream therapy, chanting the lyrics to Beyonce songs over and over until she has no voice left. When Ann-Marie falls to the floor, exhausted, Stephanie thrusts a pen and paper at her, telling her to write, but no words come. Stephanie promptly posts a photo of the empty page to her blog, describing it as ‘a testament to the silence of your generation of women, who neglect to vote despite the fact that your forebears starved to death to win the vote’. The blog goes viral, and the pair are invited onto Radio 4, where Stephanie continues to make ex-cathedra statements about the younger generation. Ann-Marie is anonymous, a bag over her head, a blank slate for the older women to project onto.

Stephanie defines post-feminism as ‘kitsch… the aftermath of true existence’. (‘In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster’, Kundera said – a line that would fairly apply to Ann-Marie). The problem of how to construct an identity in a world where equality has apparently been achieved is crucial for Ann-Marie and her social group. They cling to relics of their childhood, like Disney movies, or adopt hipster affectations, talking in Tao Lin quotes. For women, the problem is exacerbated; as Stephanie pithily sums up, ‘you’re caught between the housewife and the whore. That bloody Nigella Lawson has got a lot to answer for’. Images of Amy Winehouse recur throughout the novel like a secular saint, Princess Di for Generation Y. Winehouse has become something of a floating signifier onto which characters can project their own prejudices, turning her life into a celebration of female creativity and myth-making, or the tragedy of a woman who fell for a man and then negated herself by her determination to stay with him; a post-modern icon for a post-feminist culture.

Ann-Marie picks up identities as it suits her, throwing herself recklessly into them in order to test her boundaries. In her first appearance, she appears predatory, an embodiment of raunch culture, full of suggestive chat about adopting pussies, and ‘lounging around on my chaise longue in my red silk kimono’. Later, she demonstrates an equal familiarity with the language of self-help, describing her Cambridge education as ‘a curse and a blessing in a way because when one elevates oneself above the quotidian, one starts feeling terribly lonesome, as though one will never find a soulmate again’. In the absence of a clearly-defined role to perform, she bounces around from one identity to another, ‘trapped in all this freedom’. Her speech rarely rings true, suggesting her own lack of conviction in the characters she adopts.

The sense of identity as a fluid, unfixed commodity is reinforced by Pilger’s magpie style, which borrows scenarios from rom-coms, jargon from academia and stylistic tics from alt lit, such as her way of orientating the reader through constant references to Stuff – 50 Shades, magazines, TV programmes. Also familiar from alt lit is the protagonist’s sense of alienation from the events which surround her, and the stream of mooted projects which never come to fruition. Eat My Heart Out also comes with a hefty dose of satire, as Pilger skewers the cutesiness of ‘post-feminist cupcakes’ and the ‘having your feminist cupcake and eating it’ idiom of London’s nightlife alike: ‘It’s like a neo-burlesque social innovation start-up? It’s a pop-up? It’s not like stripping’.

While there’s plenty of material for readers to get their teeth into, thematically (and the novel clearly encourages this, Pilger inserting a series of closely observed facsimiles of academic literature into the text), Eat Your Heart Out is, above all, a genuinely entertaining read. Propelled along at a manic pace, there are some brilliantly observed set pieces. She might not be at Alan Hollinghurst’s exalted level, but Pilger can write a party, the Samuel Johnson Prize dinner and the opening night of a pop-up art gallery being two highlights. There are castrations, literal and metaphorical, there are scenes of outrageous hedonism and horrific comedowns.

The Telegraph has recently identified and branded a new genre, ‘chick noir’ (please god let it never catch on), in which authors chart the break-up of marriages, rather than the build-up. To continue using cinematic terms, if Gone Girl is noir, then Eat My Heart Out is a video nasty, provocative, cathartic and full of adrenaline-pumping thrills.