“Eight Bites” by Carmen Maria Machado is a depressing read. It focuses on the narrator’s struggle with her weight/appearance and her difficult relationship with her daughter. I noticed that the reader doesn’t receive much information on the narrator that isn’t related to either or both of these topics. They’re both such negative topics, and even the happiness that she feels after her surgery doesn’t feel legitimate.
“I wasn’t a fat child or teenager,” she explains, later adding, “But then I had a baby.” It sets up the underlying small amount of contempt she seems to hold for Cal, the baby in question. The narrator compares Cal to a “heavy-metal rocker trashing a hotel room before departing.” With short stories, every detail and every comparison become more important. The narrator describing her daughter in such a way as soon as the daughter as a character is introduced says a lot about the narrator’s true feelings. I get the sense that the narrator blames her daughter for the way she looks and that the daughter picked up on it through the years. It’s a tragic but fairly basic scenario: mom hates kid for ruining a part of her life, kid hates mom for being a terrible mom.
After the narrator gets her surgery and the body she wants, she’s in pain, and then she’s happy. As aforementioned, the happiness seems fake in a way. Her daughter does not contact her, and she mentions a feeling of emptiness. She’s told that she’s beautiful by her sisters, whom the readers only know as first sister, second sister, and third sister, but no satisfaction is tied to it. Eventually, a “thing” starts haunting the narrator’s home. It manifests itself as a dark entity in the rough shape of the narrator’s daughter. The first time the narrator sees it, it is crying, and the narrator kicks her and hits her with a broom and otherwise violently assaults her. Tying back to the narrator’s secret hatred for her daughter, her reaction to this entity is all the more awful.
By the end of the story, leaving off with the narrator’s death, I’m not sure how I feel about her. I sympathize with the fact that she did something drastic to change her appearance, but she was so absorbed with it that she neglected her own child. It is briefly mentioned that Cal has a kid of her own now, and the two of them only visited once a year. This story demonstrates how an extremely negative self-image can affect someone, but it also shows that actions have consequences. If you only focus on the bad about yourself, how can you expect others to do anything but the same?