“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.”