How To Be Eaten

In present-day New York City, five women with publicly known traumas gather for experimental group therapy in a YMCA basement. Each was recruited through persistent emails offering free sessions for women whose personal traumas played out in the public eye. The novel reimagines classic fairy-tale figures as modern women navigating a contemporary world of reality television, tabloid media, and internet culture. Each week, one woman tells her story while the others listen and react, guided by Will, a handsome and attentive group leader who enforces a policy of "Absolute Honesty." Over five sessions, their stories intertwine and their bonds deepen, even as a hidden betrayal threatens to exploit them all over again.

Bernice, recognizable from recent headlines as "Bluebeard's Girlfriend," goes first. She grew up in a modest East Hampton house across from the blue mansion of Ashton Adams, a tech billionaire. Living in the shadow of her more accomplished older sister, Naomi, Bernice is flattered when Ashton pursues her with extravagant blue-themed gifts and shows her his prized collections: canopic jars, leather journals, an inlaid-bone dresser. He gives her passcodes to the mansion's locked rooms and a skeleton key to one forbidden room, asking her not to enter. She enters anyway and discovers the preserved body of a former girlfriend. She realizes the collections she admired were made from human remains. The mansion locks down digitally, trapping her, and Ashton delivers a self-justifying monologue before what he intends to be her murder. A UPS deliveryman inadvertently opens the front door, allowing Bernice to escape. By the time police arrive, Ashton is dead from self-administered cyanide. The media treats Bernice as a possible accomplice rather than a victim. She moves to a sublet in Queens and begins hearing the dead women's spirits speak through the objects Ashton crafted from their bodies: canopic jars, leather journals, a lamp, a bone dresser, and a silent step stool. The dead women argue constantly and refuse to let Bernice share her own story. Bernice tells the group she feels trapped by survivor's guilt: The dead women deserve to be heard, but their ceaseless voices are destroying her.

Ruby, the second speaker, arrives at the next session having fainted and collapsed, drenched in red liquid later revealed to be fake blood thrown by an animal-rights protester. She wears a massive, filthy fur coat everywhere she goes. Ruby recounts a chaotic day of being fired from a coffee shop and engaging in self-destructive behavior before revealing the coat's origin: At age 12, wearing a red hoodie, she encountered a talking wolf in her suburban neighborhood. Drawn to his attention, she told him where she was going, her grandmother's house. The wolf killed her grandmother and swallowed Ruby. A man with a hunting knife cut her out of the wolf's stomach and later made her a coat from the wolf's skin. In the aftermath, a televised interview subtly blamed 12-year-old Ruby for the attack, and she has since been the subject of sensationalized media coverage and sanitized children's books. Ruby bears scars from cutting and describes an addictive cycle of seeking danger and pain. When the group asks why she still wears the coat, she insists it made her who she is.

Between sessions, a brief chapter reveals that Will is not a real person but a lifelike prosthetic suit worn by an older man whose identity is not yet disclosed.

Ashlee, the third speaker, is the recent winner of The One, a Bachelor-style dating show hosted by Jake Jackson. She describes being isolated without her phone or any sense of time before and during filming. Her producer, Hana, became her sole confidant, coaching her to "manifest" winning. Hana orchestrated Ashlee's aggression toward a rival contestant named Ashley Y, and tensions escalated until a cocktail glass shattered and its stem impaled Ashley Y's hand. Jake Jackson extracted inflammatory quotes from Ashlee in exchange for telling her the time, and editors cast Ashlee as the season's villain. When she returned to real life with her fiancé Brandon, the show's lead, she found him angry and distant, her phone filled with death threats. Ashlee begins to question whether her love for Brandon was real or manufactured by the producers.

A second interstitial chapter reveals that the man inside the Will suit is secretly recording all sessions through hidden cameras for a reality TV show. He plans to pitch the footage as a philanthropic experiment, intending to air it regardless of the women's consent.

Gretel, the fourth speaker, is a conservationist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art who preserves broken things as they are, never replacing what is missing. She tells the group about Jade, a woman she loved who did not recognize Gretel's famous name, allowing Gretel to exist without the weight of her public story for the first time. Gretel then reveals her childhood: She and her brother Hans were deliberately abandoned by their desperate, impoverished parents. They found a house Gretel insists was made of candy, a detail Hans later recanted. An old woman took them in, feeding Hans lavishly while starving Gretel. Gretel killed the woman by pushing her into an oven to protect her brother. Hans remembers the woman as lonely but kind; Gretel remembers captivity and menace. Her inability to share this past destroyed her relationship with Jade. The group responds by collectively listing the contradictory rules imposed on women, finding unexpected unity.

Raina, the final speaker, reveals she is Jake Jackson's wife. Her father, who had an alcohol addiction, met Jake at a bar and arranged a job for Raina at the show's production company. In a windowless office, a mysterious small man appeared whom Raina calls "Little Man." He completed all her editing tasks with extraordinary skill and explained reality TV's manipulative mechanics: reactions spliced out of context, audio cut and reassembled to fabricate sentences contestants never said. He had been blacklisted after refusing to edit a man with a disability as a villain. Jake courted Raina, and they slept together. He gave her father an envelope of money, which Raina recognizes as payment. When she discovered she was pregnant, Little Man offered to raise the child, giving her three days to choose and challenging her to learn his real name. Raina tracked him to his apartment, overheard him singing his name, and on the third day spoke it aloud, choosing Jake. In anguish, Little Man stomped his foot through the floor and tore himself physically in half. Jake's publicist spun the incident to portray Jake as a hero. Raina admits that she and Little Man were lovers, and her daughter, Oribel, is his child, not Jake's.

During Raina's confession, Will is overcome with emotion and the seam of his suit blows open, collapsing off his body to reveal Jake Jackson: old, dry-skinned, hair in a net. The women react with horror. Jake pitches the footage as a philanthropic opportunity, but when they refuse, he threatens to air it anyway. He retaliates against Raina by accusing her of infidelity.

In an epilogue months later, Bernice narrates the aftermath. She has given up the haunted furniture, and her apartment is quiet for the first time. She visits the canopic jars, now displayed at The Met, where she still hears the dead women's voices. Ruby works at a bookstore café and has stopped wearing the wolf coat. Raina lives upstate considering college. Ashlee is Bernice's roommate, having left Brandon. Jake is embroiled in a legal battle with the women. Bernice anticipates his team will try to discredit them, but the women have given her their blessing to write their stories herself. Reflecting that the past is "infinitely reframeable," Bernice resolves to get to work, positioning herself as the author of the account the reader has just finished.