THE MEAL

CANNIBAL

ANNA JOURNEY

I’ve been thinking a lot about cannibals lately. Fairy tale cannibals. Biblio-cannibals. I’ve been thinking about books eating books. Several months ago, I received an email from a stranger named Jodi, who wrote to notify me of my act of accidental cannibalism. Jodi told me that I’d stolen her young daughter’s innocence, that I needed to do something to stop other children from losing their innocence, too.

The situation involved a literary switcheroo: a bizarre accident at a book bindery. My writing, I learned, had inadvertently cannibalized a New York Times best-selling children’s novel. Two essays from my nonfiction collection appear as chapters in Jodi’s daughter’s edition of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, by fantasy author Kelly Barnhill. At some point during the binding process, my book’s third signature — a unit of bound pages — replaced the third signature of the children’s novel. Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon features a spunky little witch-girl named Luna who lives in the woods with her adopted family: Fyrian, an ecstatic, Chihuahua-sized dragon; Glerk, a serene, poetry-quoting swamp monster; and Xan, a loving yet grumbly old witch. Xan had rescued baby Luna from a barbaric ritual in which a group of village elders had left the infant in the forest to die. In trying to revive the baby, Xan mistakenly gave Luna a drink of potent moonlight instead of mellow starlight. The child then developed supernatural powers that grew increasingly turbulent as Luna approached her teens.

The Girl Who Drank the Moon — aimed at children 10 to 14 — is advertised as “an epic coming-of-age fairy tale.” Throughout Barnhill’s nearly 400-page book, Luna’s adolescence looms as an allegorized threat that recalls many familiar tropes about “uncontrollable” women: moons and madness, lunacy and menstruation. “It was starting early,” Barnhill writes of the girl’s intensifying magic. “All that power — the great surging ocean of it — was leaking out.” The well-meaning Xan casts a spell to stunt Luna’s magic, temporarily cocooning the girl, like a moth or Sleeping Beauty, so the young witch won’t set the forest on fire or turn her loved ones into rabbits. Xan needs more time to teach Luna how to wield her lunar gifts. At the end of the novel, Luna emerges from her stasis to save the people of the neighboring village, the Protectorate, from a fascist council of elders and an evil nemesis-witch.

My essays — “The Guineveres” and “Strange Merchants” — consume pages 55–87 of Jodi’s daughter’s book. “The Guineveres” explores my mother’s penchant for telling macabre tales at the dinner table, while “Strange Merchants” riffs on the theme of “the stranger.” In the mutant novel — the Frankenbook — Kelly Barnhill’s work stops after the following paragraphs:

“Come down this instant, young lady,” the Witch hollered.

The little girl laughed. She flitted toward the ground, leaping from leaf to leaf, guiding the other children safely behind her. Xan could see the tendrils of magic fluttering behind her like ribbons. Blue and silver, silver and blue. They billowed and swelled and spiraled in the air.

On the next page, my essay “The Guineveres” starts:

My mother’s always marveled at Ted Bundy’s charisma, his trick with the fake injuries, his voluminous hairdo. Throughout my childhood she’d recite the serial killer’s murderous steps like a mantra — the arm sling, the dropped stack of books, the women Bundy shoved into his white Volkswagen Beetle. “Don’t ever get into a stranger’s car,” she warned my younger sister and me.

In that same paragraph, I recall my mom’s other storytelling obsessions: Trotsky, the exiled Marxist who died by an assassin’s ice axe; Travis, the pet chimpanzee who gnawed off a woman’s face; and Rosie, the 10-year-old girl from our northern Virginia suburb who was kidnapped, smothered, and dumped beneath a pine tree.

After “The Guineveres,” my essay “Strange Merchants” proceeds through Barnhill’s interrupted tale. In “Strange Merchants,” I recount how my father once bought a leather trench coat, at a Bolivian airport, from an older German immigrant who may have been a Nazi in hiding. The timing — late ’70s — and the place would’ve been about right. I also mention my parents’ ex-pat term in Germany:

In 1975 my mother and father moved to Peine, in the German state of Lower Saxony, so my father could begin a research position in a plastic pipe manufacturing plant. For a year they lived just three miles from the memorial grounds of Bergen-Belsen. My mother asked my dad several times to come with her to visit the site of the former concentration camp, but he refused. Although my father remains a formidable history buff who can discuss with encyclopedic precision the finer points of World War II — battles, geographical terrain,