I’m Starved for You

I’m Starved for You is a 2012 novella by Margaret Atwood, originally published as a Byliner Original and later expanded and incorporated into her 2015 novel The Heart Goes Last. The novella stands on its own and serves as a kind of overture for the longer book. The setup is pure dystopian Atwood. After an economic collapse has left huge numbers of people homeless and unemployed in the United States, a private corporation called Consilience has built an experimental community called Positron, where residents take turns living a normal middle class suburban life and serving time as inmates in a model prison.

The novella follows Stan and Charmaine, a married couple who have signed up for the Positron program in desperation. They split their time between their suburban house and their assigned prison cells, alternating with another couple who use the same house when they are inside. The Alternates, as they are called, have their own bedroom in the house and are not supposed to interact with Stan and Charmaine. Of course they do. Atwood handles the slow inversion of who is sleeping in whose bed, and the deeper inversions of identity and consent that follow, with the dry wit and slight discomfort that her readers expect.

The novella is short, sharp, and reads almost like a Twilight Zone episode written by someone with thirty more years of literary training. The themes Atwood is working with, around technology, surveillance, the privatization of public life, and the gendered economy of the body, are all here in compressed form. The Heart Goes Last expands them across three hundred more pages.

For readers who liked The Handmaid’s Tale or the MaddAddam trilogy, I’m Starved for You is essential. For new Atwood readers, this is a low commitment way to sample her dystopian voice before tackling her larger novels.