Book Review

First encounters with sexual feelings and relationships can be a clumsy, bewildering mix of indescribable pleasure and discomfort.

In her slim, remarkable novella Cecilia, K-Ming Chang uses surreal, strikingly original and surprising prose to describe that experience in the context of queer-girl desire. In language rich with unsettling and arresting imagery, a twenty-four-year-old narrator revisits a formative, deeply affecting relationship from her adolescence—a youthful best-friendship that evolved into a confused, hungry intimacy that continues to resonate.

Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award winner, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her work has also been longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Like the Taiwanese American author’s other books of fiction—Bone House, Bestiary, Organ Meats, Gods of Want—Cecilia delves into themes related to memory, the blurred boundaries between friendship, and the dynamics of female kinship and lineage. Here again, Chang’s writing verges on poetry, full of descriptions that defamiliarize the otherwise ordinary world her characters inhabit. It’s a style particularly effective and evocative for telling this story about two teenage girl friends traversing new and unfamiliar aspects of their identities and sexualities

Seven, named for the American soda, is living with her mother, grandmother, and brother, watching a lot of TV in their rented apartment, when she unexpectedly sees Cecilia at the chiropractic clinic where Seven works as a cleaner. “It was her face. Her narrow chin, which I’d envied. Glistening as if I’d licked it.” Cecilia was the center of Seven’s world as a young teen. She hasn’t had contact with Cecilia in nearly ten years since their friendship ended abruptly, but an intense obsession persists.

The two women cross paths again at a bus stop, where they board and stand close to one another without saying much. Captive together, “tinned inside a bus, narrowed inside night,” they tentatively reconnect, reminiscing about things like trapping slugs as children and their muddled understanding of human reproduction and the male anatomy, “Remember how you used to think boys gave birth to boys and girls gave birth to girls?” But mostly they stand in dark silence, as Seven reflects on her history with Cecilia, her rich interiority slowly revealing the evolution of their erotically charged friendship.

Through introspective narration and a distinctive voice, Seven unspools their past—playing alone in a laundromat as young children, watching porn on a library computer at their middle school, acting out scenes from movies—alongside details from her homely life with her mother and grandmother. We don’t know what Cecilia, nine months older than Seven and the more knowing and sophisticated of the two, thinks. She’s mostly quiet.

Chang tells Seven and Cecilia’s story using lurid, sensual, grotesque imagery, and a vast and varied amount of bodily emissions, like “The bus was emptying like a nosebleed, clots of people sliding by the windows.” Boarding the bus, Seven extends her hand to help Cecilia climb the stairs. “It was instinctual, reaching out to her. She stared at the cup of my hand, then bent her head and drooled into it. A jewel jiggled in the center of my palm. A nickel I didn’t solicit.”  These unexpected, jarring, often repulsive descriptions slick and pool throughout.

Chang’s dreamlike, disorienting descriptions work extraordinarily well to express Seven’s growing awareness of her sexual self and her obsessive feelings for Cecilia. The bizarre imagery and metaphors, the girls’ encounters with the gross and the erotic simultaneously, effectively convey the way Seven and Cecilia approach their changing bodies and how societal norms can impose expectations that twist and distort those feelings into guilt and shame.

Birds and other creatures swim, fly, and crawl through the pages and Seven’s thoughts, particularly crows with sharp beaks and shiny black feathers. They’re feral, violent in their appetites, enviably free, and unconstrained by such rules and expectations, particularly regarding sexuality and identity, that govern and restrain Seven’s life. “I realized that these creatures could do anything outside my imagining, do things for illegible reasons,” Seven says.

As the bus ride wears on into the night, Seven slowly unfurls the sharply poignant story of what happened between the two girls. Chang’s wildly original, deranging, and deft prose vividly expresses the intricate complexities of early desire, particularly the disconcerting alienation that can accompany queer desire, and the enduring impact of a profoundly formative relationship. “Who hasn’t ever wondered,” the quote from Clarice Lispector asks, fittingly, in the novel’s epigraph, “am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”