Scala Radio Book Club: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda
Last updated 17th Aug 2022
In the Scala Radio Book Club this week (Thursday 24th March 2022), Mark Forrest chatted to writer and musician Claire Kohda on her debut novel Woman, Eating.
Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside - the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But Lydia can't eat any of this. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London - where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time - is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.
Then there are the humans: the people at the gallery she interns at, the strange men who follow her after dark, and Ben, a goofy-grinned artist she is developing feelings for. Lydia knows that they are her natural prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them.
If Lydia is to find a way to exist in the world, she must reconcile the conflicts within her - between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans. Before any of this, however, she must eat.
Woman, Eating puts a deliciously fresh spin on a vampire narrative while mining serious themes of race, misogyny and body image.
Mark began the interview asking, ‘Where do you start when writing about a vampire that’s trying to live as humanly as possible?’
‘I wouldn't say that I am a vampire fan,’ said Claire. ‘That doesn't mean I don’t like vampire books, but I haven't really read many. Most of my influences come from Japanese and Korean books. So I wasn't approaching this book from the perspective of knowing a lot about vampires, and knowing a lot about what other people had designed for them. It sounds a bit weird, but that was quite a good thing for me. I quite liked not knowing and funnily enough, it’s quite similar in music. I really enjoy playing instruments that I technically can't play. It just frees me up a bit!’
‘What's interesting about the book is your central character, Lydia,’ said Mark. ‘Yes, she's a vampire, but she's a young woman. She's struggling to find her place in the world. There's not really that much difference between Lydia and other twentysomething young men and women.’
‘Yeah, for me the vampire figure was interesting because the only thing that really sets a vampire apart from us humans is their diet. As someone who is mixed-race Asian, it is really interesting because I think for a lot of Asians, food and cuisine are used quite a lot to set them apart from others. So food becomes often, the source of why we might be made to feel different. Lydia, being a vampire, she’s made to feel foreign everywhere she goes because her diet is different to literally everyone on the planet.’
‘You're a writer, a journalist, a reviewer, but you're also a professional musician. What do you play and who do you perform with?’
‘I play the violin. I usually play in orchestras, so I do a lot with the London Contemporary Orchestra, and I've played with the English Chamber Orchestra. I really enjoy doing session work, like film scores and albums. I'm a freelancer at my core, and I think I always will be just because you can mix lots of musical genres. One day you might be playing something classical and the next day, you're doing a really weird album, which I really love!’
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