I can’t stop thinking about this incredibly smart and totally unique novel. Ranging from online obsession, to mothers and daughters, to the very nature of selfhood, Chrysalis is strange and warm and, crucially, very funny. With shades of Han Kang, Catherine Lacey, and Gwendoline Riley, Metcalfe’s writing is both dissecting and effortless; I savored every last brilliant sentence.” —Ruth Gilligan, author of The Butchers’ Blessing Chrysalis is a thrilling look at how we spin silk around ourselves by watching the world on our screens.”— The New York Times Book Review Consider the above question in light of what Susie says here. Although some ask about Nicola's friends and family and wonder where the children are, many are moved by her presence, her strength, her stillness – her inner power. WOW. I just devoured this. What a wonderful, painful, funny novel… It’s so beautiful and cruel, and summed up just perfectly by the ending – a flawless final sentence, one of the best I’ve ever read, it absolutely gave me chills’ Avni Doshi I was alternately intrigued and bemused by the structure of Chrysalis, and then I heard Anna Metcalfe speaking and she stated that the structure of her novel is near identical to Hang Kang’s The Vegetarian . I was a bit disappointed to hear this.

Over the course of the novel it becomes clear that the woman is preparing for “the next phase” of her life where she will leave those who knew her behind, in favour of something else. The abandoned narrators watch the content that she creates and posts online: she is a wellness influencer of a sort and her strange videos are devoted to strength and stillness. “Variously all three narrators describe her as being made out of stone or carved from something, so it’s as if she becomes made of some natural material rather than a person. Something that’s more durable or more permanent than a person.” Her hair was shiny, there was a flush in her cheeks. She made me nervous, but it felt good. I liked being near her and that was something new. Most of the time, strange people made me nauseous. People in general gave me a headache. But she was a pleasant change, like a refreshing breeze. She smelled of mint and something sweet. Chrysalis tells of one unnamed woman’s self-transformation into an online phenomenon from the perspective of three other people: Elliot, who watches her obsessively in the gym; her mother Bella, who frets about the person her anxious child has grown into; and Susie, a former colleague and friend. Susie, a work colleague, supports the protagonist when she leaves her dysfunctional relationship and her job at a law firm. Susie watches the woman develop her autonomy and train herself to be as still as possible through meditation. Her resilience becomes performative as she posts videos and launches a career as a cult figure who embraces solitude. Anna Metcalfe’s Chrysalis deliberately reworks aspects of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Like Kang’s novel it’s divided into three parts in which the same, nameless woman is viewed from different angles. Metcalfe touches on concerns that frequently surface in discussions of strands in contemporary western society: from the role of social media influencers and fandom to the wellness and self-sufficiency industries through to transactional relationships, narcissism and voyeurism. Each of her narrators is witness to an aspect of the nameless woman’s transformation from floundering, and possibly traumatised, to seemingly-invulnerable colossus. Two of these three are people who’ve met the woman as an adult, Elliot with whom she has a brief sexual relationship and Susie her former work colleague, the third is her mother Bella.Elliot is a freelancer and his “big jobs” define him, but the passages describing his work habits make no direct reference to what he does. Susie’s hinterland is also only glimpsed, and through the book we uncover much about why the protagonist becomes an influencer, but little sense of how. In a novel concerned with curated displays of experience, this wonky, haphazard cleansing of context works. It heightens the forcefield around its subject, giving her that ultrafiltered, hyperreal plausibility that is influencer capital. I felt that I could see her large stilled form, the tree stirring behind her in her overgrown garden, and could understand why a person might follow her – the “cool and pleasant feeling” that she can induce. The absence of context also feeds the feeling that something is seriously amiss. “Cut yourself off,” she urges her followers. “Do you really need the people in your life, or do they need you?” Jacqueline Alnes: This book seems so much about perception: how we view ourselves, how we view other people, the world. What about the novel allowed you to explore that?

It was hard to be in the present, she said, but if her body were heavier and more in control, then her thoughts would clear and her mind would recover its power.Sometimes when you give readers loads of details, I feel like you give them a to-do list of things to imagine, whereas if you give them two details, their minds will fill in the rest. And they will feel more invested because of that, because they have co-created it with you.” Living online and offline In the end, our main character decides to cut out all relationships and focuses on not just slow living but slow moving; she is able to hold a yoga pose for hours on end. Through her dedication and YouTube videos, she amasses a small cult following who follows her lead and rejects society--perhaps, in a way, the only way a woman can be truly safe in this world?

I am not going to lie; this book floored me in a good way. The author did a spectacular job showcasing how society views the body of women in such a layered way. The story is told from the perspective of three characters: The effect of the novel’s triptych form feels like looking at the protagonist through the lens of a kaleidoscope, each segment dazzling, but ultimately fractured, leaving compelling gaps in our perception of who she is. This theme is echoed in the narrative itself. As the protagonist isolates herself in reality, she experiences a meteoric rise in fame as an influencer, curating every bit of her existence and crafting the ways she allows herself to be seen by others. Throughout the novel, through the eyes of others, we watch as the protagonist metamorphoses into someone who becomes nearly unrecognizable, leaving each narrator –– and readers –– to wonder if they ever really knew her at all. Metcalfe describes through three perspectives the transformation of a woman who has been traumatized. We meet her when she joins the first narrator's gym, and she is so sure of herself that he can't help but to be transfixed. She decides to bulk rather than slim down in an effort to take up space. We later get the perspective of her mother, who describes to us her manner of being as a young child through young adulthood. Finally, we see who she is through a work friend and flatmate, who describes the change before her abusive relationship and after. Her artist mother Bella describes her relationship to the sometimes fearful and volatile child she sought to soothe, and her former colleague Susie bears witness to the protagonist’s toxic relationship with a man she met at work before she quits her job (and boyfriend) and embarks on her mysterious metamorphosis. But to what end?

10 Short Stories About Women’s Transformations

She is noticed by Elliot as he trains in in the gym. He sees her dedication to building her body and taking up space, and he is drawn to her strength. She is observed by her mother, as she grows from a taciturn, tremulous child into a determined and distant woman, who severs all familial ties. She is watched by her former colleague Susie, who offers her sanctuary and support as she leaves her partner and rebuilds her life, transforming her body and reinventing herself online. Each of these three witnesses desires closeness. Each is left with only the husk of the person they thought they knew, before she became someone else: a woman on a singular and solitary path with the power to inspire and to influence her followers, for good and ill. Things have changed a lot since that first day. She's kind of famous. Or at least, she has a lot of followers online. People admire her authenticity, her focus and determination. They say the way she holds her body is a kind of truth.”

This story is a bit of an odd one - the central plot follows an unnamed woman who becomes an online wellness cult leader and is told through the perspectives of three outsiders, which is an interesting conceit as, by nature, all three of the narrators paint incomplete and unreliable pictures of the protagonist. My main gripe is with the writing style - the protagonist being unnamed is so unnecessary and makes it annoying to read as the narrators constantly refer to "she" and "her" - it comes across as a lazy way to make the character seem more mysterious. I also could have done without a lot of the superfluous details (especially from the first narrator) - I skimmed over a lot of mundane text. By far the strongest was the second narrator, the protagonist's mother, as the third narrator hardly appeared to have any point of view at all. Metcalfe was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award in 2014 for “Number Three”, a story that later appeared in her first collection of short stories, Blind Water Pass, published by John Murray in 2016. The effect of the novel’s triptych form feels like looking at the protagonist through the lens of a kaleidoscope, each segmentdazzling, but ultimately fractured, leaving compelling gaps in our perception of who she is.” — Electric Lit AM: I thought about how any kind of historically marginalized community advocating for themselves has to start out by saying, “This is happening and we think this is wrong.” Rather than being met with a bunch of other people saying, “Yes, this is wrong, what can we do about it?” you’re often met with, “We don’t think that’s real.” Then you have to spend all this time persuading people that there is, in fact, a problem to solve, before you can even start to solve a problem.In trying to understand her through their perspectives, you slowly come to understand the narrators and their experiences. That form hopefully allows a reader to consider how the things that they look at—the things that they experience, the people that they see or encounter through their phones online—are forces that act upon them. To some extent, the things that you look at, or allow your attention to be consumed by, become constructive [or] destructive forces on yourself.” Metcalfe, who teaches creative writing at the University of Birmingham, set her students a timed writing exercise in the classroom: to invent their own “recalcitrant or hard to pin down” protagonist and then describe that character through three different points of view in 20 minutes. She sat down to do the same exercise alongside her students, and Chrysalis was born. “I’ve really borrowed my whole structure from Han Kang, hopefully not in an exercise of plagiarism but more in literary adoration,” she says cheerfully, when we meet for tea near London Bridge. Incredibly smart and totally unique... ranging from online obsession, to mothers and daughters, to the very nature of selfhood, the whole thing is strange and warm and, crucially, very funny... I savoured every last brilliant sentence' - Ruth Gilligan An unnerving, compelling and utterly contemporary debut novel about one woman's metamorphosis into an online phenomenon, from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-shortlisted writer. She is watched by Elliot as he trains in the gym. He notices her dedication to building her body and taking up space, and he is drawn to her strength. She is observed by her mother, as she grows from a taciturn, tremulous child into a determined and distant woman, who severs all familial ties. She is observed by her former colleague Susie, who offers her sanctuary and support as she leaves her partner and her job and rebuilds her life, transforms her body, and reinvents herself online. Each of these three witnesses to the woman desires closeness. Each is left with only the husk of who she was before she became someone else: a woman on a singular and solitary path with the power to inspire and to influence her followers, for good and ill. An oblique, intimate novel told in lucid, beguiling prose, Chrysalis a story about solitude and selfhood, and about the blurred line between self-care and narcissism. It is about controlling the body and the mind, about the place of the individual within society and what is means when someone choses to leave society behind. It is strikingly contemporary story about the search for answers and those we trust to give them to us. This bizarre little book was one I judged by its cover when I spotted it at the bookstore. I couldn’t look away and it had to come home with me. Sometimes these book cover assumptions make me look like quite the fool but this one had me sitting high up on my pedestal.