Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling
together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose,
and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are
all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too
much." (Esmé Weijun Wang)
A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a
woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things
have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly
excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat
with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a
plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of
expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross.
On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems
with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less
sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too
Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman
familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as
without.
Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other
frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to
reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and
spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and
storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our
bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we
desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between
that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern
policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to
encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana
Del Rey.
This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have
learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes
us "Too Much."
