The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

4 Stars

Flickering through recycled realities, losing myself in myself, over and over.

The Refrigerator Monologues is a mashup of The Vagina Monologues and comic book history. Valente uses some pretty well known female comic book characters and riffs off them. Each character's place in Deadtown is introduced and then she shares her origin story and how she got "refrigerated", written out.

Trouble is, my story is his story. The story of Kid Mercury crowds out everything else, like Christmas landing on the shops in August while Halloween tries to get a bat in edgewise.

It's funny, and a great rage read that makes you laugh even though some of it makes you want to cry at the same time. If you can't laugh it's just sad. Right?

It always stings when there's this whole story going on and you're really just a B-plot walk-on who only got a look at three pages of the script. 

I like an outraged political statement that's thirty years out of date. If they'd had one that said Warren G. Harding Is the Anti-Christ, I'd have grabbed that one, too. Occupy Yesterday, baby!  

I called him my manic pixie fucktoy.

Yeah, we've all pick up toys and realized we should have left them on the shelf. Plenty of reasons to throw him back, let someone else have that "catch".

But the longer I'm dead, the more I think the universe is a big blackboard with the rules scrawled all over it in chalk and stardust and it's just that the damn thing is flipped over and turned away from us so we can't see anything but the eraser, which is death, hitting the floor. Write out your life one thousand times, kid, or you'll have to come back and finish tomorrow.

Valente's knowledge of ancient Greeks is evident throughout the story, but I guess I just really love how she describes the Hell Hath Club and Deadtown because they sound exactly like shades. The dead are jealous of the living for precisely this reason:

Everthing tastes a little thin, a little slight. It's more like we were buried with the memory or the idea of hunger, and now it's stuck to us like old toilet paper.

Also, calls Odysseus a dick--knew I loved this writer for a reason. Yes, if you follow my reviews every time he appears I will totally call him out for the liar and thief he was--he's not a hero; he's an asshole.

The underworld's come a long way since Helen and Medea and Iphigenia and Clytemnestra painted the town black--the original Hell Hath Club.

As women we keep saying that, but when do we get to the end of road? Why aren't we there, yet? Anyway, highly recommend this book if you can comprehend the amount of suppressed frustration and rage women carry around with them or if you do.