Fully immersed in the interstitial space between two cultures, Carribean Fragoza’s brutally honest short story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, is pure literatura fronteriza centering on women. It does much more than chronicle the lives of those in that space; it delves deep into their realities and truths, taking readers on short journeys with the bodies and souls of women who exist between here and there, between English and Spanish, between reality and the world on the other side of the veil.
Sometimes fantastical, Fragoza’s collection defies categorization. Women, multiculturalism, family, and life on the U.S.-Mexico border serve as elements of cohesion, but each story is distinct. “Lumberjack Mom,” which opens the collection, is about a heartbroken mother who picks up an axe and starts chopping things into pieces after her husband leaves home one day, never to return. Told from the perspective of one of her daughters, the tale follows the mother’s newfound obsession with the axe but soon morphs into a narrative about dealing with the past, finding coping mechanisms for handling the trauma, and how a small thing like a lime tree can pack a lot of different meanings.
While “Lumberjack Mom” is a strong opener, it’s “The Vicious Ladies,” the second story, that sets the mood for the rest of the collection. On the surface, the story is about a young woman who falls in with the wrong crowd while entertaining dreams of a better life. She’s smart and likes to study, so she has a problem doing what she does for the gang of women she runs around and parties with: give nitrous oxide to kids. As the story progresses, it tackles issues of identity, education, the self, and upward social mobility. Fragoza, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, somehow manages to explore, in a few pages, the complexity of the way barrio kids are seen and how that often clashes with the way they see themselves.
“Eat the Mouth That Feeds You,” the title story, moves away from the unabashed emotional realism of the first two stories and quickly embraces a gory surrealism. A mother learns that memory is tied—literally and figuratively—to consumption. At once horrific and beautiful, this tale perfectly embodies Fragoza’s approach to storytelling: things aren’t always pretty, but she explores fantastical events that touch on a range of serious issues, including the heritage of bicultural and bilingual Chicana characters.
The collection’s 10 fables come from a universe in which a centuries-old virgin saint can befriend a girl struck by lightning, which happens in “Ini y Fati,” but also from an earthier place where tortillas matter and everyone watches El Chacal doing its thing on Sábado Gigante. The sublime meets the mundane here, and Fragoza’s versatility is on full display. “We are waiting for everything to break up into dust and be carried away in the wind,” reads one of the last lines of “Me Muero.” It cuts deep. It holds an eternal truth that’s hard to swallow. However, just four stories earlier, dark humor reigns: “La gente es bien pendeja.” Among other elements Fragoza employs, the tonal range makes this debut collection a must-read for fans of great short fiction.
Eat the Mouth That Feeds You goes from the awful to the hilarious within a few pages, and it shines as it does so. The darkness here is sometimes very real and sometimes supernatural, but the light always emerges from the same drive: Fragoza’s tenderhearted understanding of humanity, an understanding with which she injects honesty and empathy into all of her characters. Kaleidoscopic and self-assured, lovely and violent, poetic and brutally honest, this is also a book that unequivocally announces the arrival of a confident, unique voice.•
Join us on December 21 at 5 p.m., when Fragoza will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Kelly Link to discuss Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
