Rachel Ang
I Ate the Whole World To Find You

“If women ran the world,” observes one character in Rachel Ang’s graphic short story collection I Ate the Whole World To Find You, “the central question of philosophy would be whether to have children”. The remark comes from Willow, a youngish Australian woman – cousin to the book’s protagonist, Jenny – who has been experiencing a mysterious and debilitating pain in her legs. Specialists are stumped by Willow’s problem. “It’s like no one knows what to do with women’s bodies,” she tells Jenny, a complaint that could be directed at the male artist or writer as much as the male doctor. In fact, the two women wind up laughing at what was deemed the central question of philosophy – whether to die by suicide – by Albert Camus: “What a life!” they ponder. “What a dream!”

I Ate the Whole World To Find You comes with endorsements from Carmen Maria Machado and Rachel Yoder, two high-profile American fiction writers working out of what might be called a kind of feminist body horror. While Ang stops short of horror, their handling of gender here is at home in the conventions of this developing genre. Across five stories, each narrating a strange or traumatic event in the life of young Jenny, Ang zeros in on the unruliness of women’s bodies – their murky, morbid excess – which is never as far from breaking the surface as we might think.

Ang’s beautiful comic art often serves to drop us literally into this bodily underworld. In “The Passenger”, stuck on a train ride with an ex and his new girlfriend – who also happens to be an aspiring life coach: “Not everyone wants to dwell on old traumas,” she declares – Jenny plummets into a Vertigo-esque void in which she must fend off a pack of life-coaching geese while confronting her ex-boyfriend’s manipulation and abuse. In “Purity”, alienated by the cultural treatment of maternity – the ultrasound is “a sham, a test of fealty” – she finds relief by climbing inside her own womb, swimming around in the near-religious silence of amniotic fluid.

There is a queer sort of magic here that matches the best moments in Machado’s or Yoder’s work. Even in “Your Shadow in the Dark”, which explores the heavy toll of sexual trauma in the lives of both Jenny and Willow, Ang manages to portray those forms of reciprocity or care that go beyond the narrow social scripts of gender. A woman is a leaky, creaturely thing in these stories, constantly threatening to burst from her own seams.

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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 26, 2025 as "I Ate the Whole World To Find You".

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